White racists burning something: the common notion of white supremacy

The gunman who opened fire with an AR-15 at a Dallas mall on May 6th, killing eight including numerous members of one Korean family, was clearly targeting Asians. Perhaps it was the shooter’s name, Mauricio Garcia, that confused Texas governor Greg Abbot, who told reporters that the killer’s motivations were “unclear.” Within hours, however, investigators had discovered the extent of Garcia’s white supremacist views and connections, which included being an admirer of Adolf Hitler.

The very idea that a member of an ethnic or racial minority could be a white supremacist continues to boggle the minds of far-right pundits. Don Trump Jr. mockingly posted on Truth Social, “Because the name Mauricio Garcia screams white supremacy.” Elon Musk tweeted images of carnage from the shooting as well as disinformation, including a conspiracy theory that a Hispanic white supremacist just had to be a “psyop.” His speculation seemed to resonate with Musk’s far-right followers. When NBA-to-Twitter personality Rex Chapman called Clarence Thomas a white supremacist, FOX News mocked it as a typical liberal reaction to overturning Roe v. Wade (we will return to Justice Thomas shortly).

So don’t you have to be white to be a white supremacist?

The far-right insists that we now live in a post-racial society free of white supremacy and bias. Sure, there may still be a few overt haters out there – but not us! Denial of racism is such an important weapon of the far-right that now even speaking of America’s history of racial crimes is itself a crime in numerous states.

References to slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, white-only water fountains, lynchings, genocide of Native Americans, colonialism, racist immigration laws, redlining, disparities in healthcare, life expectancy, education, or generational wealth – all this is regarded as “divisive,” intended only to make white school children feel bad about being white, and therefore something to be censored.

Still, the far-right is equally clear that White Christian Nationalism is their political platform. Republicans point to Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban’s regime as their model for a white, Christian America. Former Congressman Steve King, an unrepentant white supremacist, granted an interview with Austrian fascists. Former president Trump, now looking like the leading GOP presidential candidate, has embraced neofascists in Italy, France, and Brazil. Trump’s one-time campaign advisor Steve Bannon has made the creation of a fascist Internationale one of his projects.

In July 2022 Marjorie Taylor Greene came out as an unapologetic Christian nationalist. Ditto her moral and intellectual equal, Lauren Boebert, who told a group of white fundamentalists, “The church is supposed to direct the government, the government is not supposed to direct the church.” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, once thought to be a “moderate” Republican, echoed the sentiment, stating that government ought to be “bowing the knee” to the church. And by “church” Scott does not mean Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Quakers, or once-mainstream Christian denominations.

Just this week Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville defended white nationalists in the military, calling them good Americans. This recalls Trump’s characterization of the Tiki torch-bearing white supremacists as “very fine people.”

Despite its obsession with white Anglo-Saxon “culture,” the dangers of multiculturalism, the Great Replacement of white people by people of color, and its perverse, nationalist conception of “Christianity,” White Christian Nationalism is also increasingly being embraced by people of color.

A few examples: former HUD secretary and denier that racism exists Ben Carson; South Carolina Senator and Christian Nationalist Tim Scott; perennial presidential candidate and antisemite Kanye West whose campaign advisor is a racist, misogynistic British fascist; North Carolina gubernatorial aspirant, Islamophobe and homophobe Mark Robinson; convicted seditionist and Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio; self-described white nationalist Nick Fuentes; and domestic terrorist and repeat seditionist Brandon Rapolla.

It came as a surprise to no one in Memphis’ Black community that the five officers who beat Tyre Nichols to death were Black. Turns out, how Black police officers approach policing is shaped by policies based on lingering structural racism in law enforcement institutions. Again, white supremacy is much more than overt hatred.

Such observations are nothing new. In the wake of the Dallas shooting Joan Walsh wrote an excellent piece in the Nation. Frank Vyan Walton published a short piece in the Daily Kos. Philip Bump offered an explanation in the Washington Post of why non-whites embrace white supremacy.

One factor is self-identification with a dominant racial and ethnic group. Increasingly, some non-white communities now identify as white. Another is placing one’s self closer to the sources of political power. Hispanic Americans now increasingly identify with white supremacy. And that includes Mauricio Garcia, the Dallas shooter.

A new TV series “Beef” features two Asian characters acting out their very “white” grievances with each other and America. In a piece in Electric Lit Frankie Huang dissects the two protagonists and their complicated relationships with white society. He parenthetically blasts members of his own community for cultural expropriation, exploiting “model minority” status, and a lack of solidarity with other minorities – all of which applies to every other ethnic group throughout American history that has embraced “whiteness” by turning its back on egalitarian ideals in order to stand nearer the sources of power and money.

Clarence chose his side and it pays pretty damn well

In an old article in the Nation, Randall Kennedy asks “Whose Side is Clarence Thomas On?” and proceeds easily to a conclusion. Quoting Corey Robin, who has written a number of books on far-right ideology, “Thomas has rationalized nearly all of his efforts to maintain the legal architecture under which African Americans have suffered most because ‘adversity helps the black community develop its inner virtue and resolve.’ Robin adds, ‘It’s astonishing how openly Thomas embraces not just federalism but a view of federalism associated with the slaveocracy and Jim Crow.'”

Ouch.

Thomas then, regardless of race, turns out to be the ideal Supreme Court justice for the far right and its white supremacist agenda. In a new PBS documentary, Clarence and Ginni Thomas: Politics, Power and the Supreme Court, we learn that Thomas has a whole list of his own grievances meshing improbably with White America’s.

Add to this Thomas’s marriage to one of America’s most zealous far-right activists and arguably a seditionist, as well as Thomas’s selling himself to Sugar Daddy Harlan Crow, and it becomes clear that white supremacy is not so much about spewing racial epithets as the preservation and concentration of political and economic power.

White supremacists of whatever race know exactly which side they’re on.

It is Black History Month and there are a couple of streamed documentaries I heartily recommend: Jeffery Robinson’s Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America (Netflix); and Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, a six part docuseries (Hulu).

I watched Robinson’s film last night on Netflix and it is excellent. At the beginning of the film Robinson meets a man standing in front of a Confederate statue waving a Confederate flag. The two have a conversation about whether that flag was a symbol of slavery and even about the nature of slavery itself. The Neo-Confederate maintains that slaves were just like members of slave-holders’ families and his flag had nothing to do with slavery. But in less than a minute the Harvard Law-trained film-maker demonstrates the contradictions of the flag-waver’s contentions. This confrontation with willful ignorance frames the film’s narrative.

Robinson, who is from Memphis and whose personal story is interwoven into the documentary, goes on to show — using the words of politicians of the time, state and federal laws and rulings, and historical documents — that America most definitely was founded on slavery. He quotes former president Donald Trump — yes, America’s chief racist ignoramus and a fan of Jackson — who says that Andrew Jackson would never have let the US slide into civil war, then points out that Jackson died 16 years before that war. Robinson goes on to show that Jackson in fact was a slave-owner himself who even posted an ad for the return of one of his own slaves — promising to pay the finder a little extra for giving the slave 300 lashes with a whip. This is who is on our $20 bill.

We wait for Robinson to complete the sentence with “this is who we are” but his stealth title “Who We Are” instead does that job for him. Robinson not once mentions the usual bromide that White America uses on the occasion of some new racial atrocity (“this is not who we are”). Robinson just knows. And we all ought to know by now: this is exactly who we are.

In perhaps the most moving segment of the film Robinson, who worked with the ACLU for many years, returns to Memphis with his brother and visits their boyhood home — a house that had to be purchased with a little subterfuge by a white couple and then transferred to Robinson’s parents. He talks about how that home made him who he is today and how everyone on that street worked hard, did their best for their children, and had all the same hopes his parents did. It is not a bitter reminiscence, but Robinson points out that what white supremacy really means is that the playing field will never be level for everyone on that street — because of government institutions that created land-grant colleges for whites, redlining for blacks, land dispossession for indigenous people, and the recycling of slave-catching practices in police institutions. Robinson methodically shows us how many of our racialized institutions are still working as designed years after the Civil Rights movement ended. And the damage to their victims continues.

The 1619 Project has become a lightning rod for people who can’t accept that America was founded on slavery and continues to do everything it can to preserve slavery’s vestiges and inequities. FOX News predictably wrote the series off as “fan fiction” and “slander.” The New York Post called it “cartoonish” and a “pretense” and wrote off one of the interviewed academics as a “Marxist.” And of course, the 1619 Project has been banned in Florida by racist governor Ron DeSantis and his appointees to the state Board of Education.

The series consists of six episodes, the last of which will air tomorrow: Democracy; Race; Music; Capitalism; Fear; and Justice. While Jeffery Robinson never indicts Capitalism outright for the sins of slavery, Hannah-Jones does so explicitly and this is the most likely reason for her rough treatment. But let’s be honest: slavery was a commercial enterprise. The value of slave labor made Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia among the richest in the nation. When slavery ended these states instantly ended up at the bottom of the American economic barrel because human capital (that is humans as property) had been instantly struck from the ledgers. And it wasn’t just Southern plantations which profited from the products of slave labor. Massachusetts textile factories depended on cotton that had been harvested for free by humans under the whip. The New York stock exchange, companies like Lehman Brothers, and insurance industries like AIG — as Robinson shows, too — fed off slavery and toyed with declaring themselves neutral in order to continue to profit from human bondage.

In what is most certainly one of the great ironies of history, while the 1619 Project has been banned and its use in Florida schools now constitutes a felony, it is now available in Germany — a country that knows something about white supremacy and book burnings — and is now ashamed of it.

The Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung carried a review of the 1619 Project in its book section, pointing out that Americans are woefully (even willfully) ignorant of their own history. Andreas Eckert cites a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center study which shows how ignorant of American history, particularly its ugliest aspects, American High School students are. Only 8% of American high schoolers could identify correctly the reason the Civil War was fought: slavery. Eckert quotes Yale history professor and Frederick Douglass biographer David Blight, who wrote the introduction to the SPLC’s “Teaching Hard History.” Blight observes that Americans always prefer to view our history in the most positive light, regarding ourselves as a beacon unto the world, bringing progress, freedom, justice, prosperity, and happiness to the benighted. This certainly seems to constitute the “patriotic curriculum” that Ron DeSantis is now about to jam down the throats of Florida public school students.

One of the greatest controversies over the 1619 Project is whether the American Revolution was fought (even in part) to preserve slavery. Hannah-Jones unapologetically says it was. In the same SPLC preface to “Teaching Hard History,” Hasan Kwame Jeffries writes, “In the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers enumerated the lofty goals of their radical experiment in democracy; racial justice, however, was not included in that list. Instead, they embedded protections for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade into the founding document, guaranteeing inequality for generations to come.” It doesn’t take much to verify these facts.

For starters, 34 of the 47 signers — a majority — of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners. Among the most famous slave owners: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and (a distant relative on my mother’s side) Charles Carroll. So don’t even try to convince me these morally compromised men created a nation for all the beating hearts in it.

The Declaration of Independence has always rung hollow to Black people. Frederick Douglass delivered a scathing oration “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” Aside from its authors and its hypocrisy, the Declaration calls indigenous people “merciless Indian Savages” and whines that King George is inhibiting the theft of indigenous land.

William J. Aceves, in “Amending a Racist Constitution,” shows us precisely where slavery was baked into the Constitutional cake:

While the Constitution never uses the words “slave” or “slavery,” the shadows of these malignant words inhabit its text. Four constitutional provisions reflect a legal architecture that treats Black people as property. Two of these provisions are substantive, and two are procedural.

Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 is the notorious Three-Fifths Clause. This provision is used to determine the number of congressional representatives apportioned to a state as well as its corresponding tax obligations. Free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, were included in the calculation of state populations. In contrast, slaves would be calculated as three-fifths of a person. Native Americans who were not taxed would not be included in these calculations. While the Three-Fifths Clause did not directly affect the rights of slaves, it served as clear evidence of their inequality. The Clause also had a profound impact on the power structure in Congress by providing slave states disproportionate political influence in the House for decades. Because of this, the slave states were even less inclined to end slavery.

Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 represents the Fugitive Slave Clause. It provides that any person who escapes from servitude and flees to another state may not gain their freedom. Instead, that person must be returned to the custody of their owner. This clause was used on countless occasions to perpetuate slavery. Individuals who had escaped from bondage by crossing state lines were subject to capture and returned to slavery. Those who aided such efforts were subject to civil or even criminal liability. While there was some resistance to its application, this pernicious clause made anti-slavery states and the federal government complicit in slavery. This complicity even extended to the Supreme Court.

Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 limited the ability of Congress to adopt legislation prohibiting the migration or importation of slaves until 1808. Congress drafted around this restriction in 1803, when it adopted An Act to Prevent the Importation of Certain Persons into Certain States, Where, by the Laws Thereof, Their Admission is Prohibited. This statute was adopted at the request of the slave states, which were concerned with the rise of free people of color in the United States and viewed the successful slave rebellion in Haiti with trepidation. Four years later, Congress took a more significant step with the Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves Into Any Port or Place Within the Jurisdiction of the United States. While the statute was drafted to end the slave trade in the United States, the practice of slavery remained legal.

Finally, Article V addresses the process for constitutional amendments. These amendments can be proposed for state ratification by a two-thirds vote in both Houses. Alternatively, amendments can be proposed through a constitutional convention called by a two-thirds vote of the states. Either process then requires approval by three-fourths of the states. Reflecting one of the central compromises to the Constitution, Article V prohibited any amendment to Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 until 1808. Working in tandem, these provisions ensured that the slave trade would remain legal in the United States for at least twenty years.

In Robinson’s film, Black students sing the third stanza of the American National Anthem (“the Star-Spangled Banner”) by Francis Scott Key, a Maryland slave owner. This stanza sings of the depravity and deserved slaughter of slaves who try to escape:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave, And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And the last stanza implies that the republic is meant only for non-slaves:

O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!

American Conservatives may be incensed at scholarship that at long last proves our nation was founded on and built by slavery, but there is no getting around the fact: it was. The battle for the nation’s soul may be on some people’s lips but it means little without recognition, repair, repentance, restitution — and major revision of our laws. But we can’t even begin if we can’t agree on facts of history that can be easily and objectively verified.

In our hearts of hearts we know the contents of our nation’s soul and who we are as a people. And, if we’re honest, it isn’t very pretty.

This is who we are.

If you have been worrying about the white supremacy now openly-displayed within Republican Party ranks, you’re not alone. Last week the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), a research group that keeps an eye on America’s far right, issued a report, Breaching the Mainstream, listing 875 legislators (almost all Republicans) with ties to nationalist groups or ones promoting conspiracy theories. Don’t feel smug, Bay Staters — you’ll find a number of Massachusetts Republicans among them.

Unfortunately, the news just keeps getting worse.

Last week Republicans took one of their conservative political conferences to Hungary — possibly the most anti-democratic Western nation of all — and literally rubbed elbows with European fascists — while only days before in Buffalo, New York a white supremacist tried to launch a race war by slaughtering Black people as they went about their grocery shopping.

On May 19-20, Hungary’s Center for Fundamental Rights hosted the American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest. After prayers, of course, Hungary’s antisemitic prime minister Viktor Orban and American white supremacist commentator Tucker Carlson joined the organizers in opening the event, which was off-limits to U.S. reporters.

Viktor Orban’s party, Fidesz, the Hungarian Civic Alliance, began life in 1988 as Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége (Alliance of Young Democrats), a liberal center-left organization that rejected Hungary’s ruling Communist government. Its members were quickly joined by Hungary’s far right. In 1994 an unlikely mix of centrists and far-right elements led Fidesz to adopt “liberal-conservativism,” driving real liberals out of the party. Within less than a decade Fidesz became a nationalist, then a hyper-nationalist, then an authoritarian party riddled with neo-fascists, antisemites, and open racists. Orban has been Hungary’s president for four terms now.

Orban set about stomping on all vestiges of the liberal order. He did everything possible to smear fellow Hungarian George Soros as both a “globalist” and a Jew, and to drive Soros’s liberal philanthropies out of Hungary. So normalized is antisemitism now within Fidesz that Day Two of the conference featured a close friend of Orban’s, Hungarian writer Zsolt Bayer, who has calls Jews “stinking excrement” and the Roma “unfit for coexistence.” Bayer has also not been shy in voicing his contempt for Black people.

After coffee the program proceeded with: former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, fired from CNN for his homophobic, racist, and pro-colonial comments; former Member of British Parliament Nigel Farage, an endorser of neo-Nazi parties in France, Austria, and Germany; Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s president, member of parliament, curiously present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th; and Ben Ferguson, who broadcasts racist, homophobic, and nationalist bile from a home studio.

Quite the group to set the tone.

For the last 45 years the CPAC conference has shaped the direction that American conservatism takes. CPAC was the launchpad for Reagan-style politics after Watergate and CPAC still defines the path of the American Republican Party. It is significant, then, that CPAC now promotes Hungary — a state no longer a democracy and one with less freedom than even Brazil — as the Republican Party’s model for America’s future.

After lunch, the program turned to “Western Civilization under Attack.” The themes were indistinguishable from those of the Buffalo, NY shooter, who in a long manifesto had written that he feared low white birth rates, the “replacement” and “genocide” of white people by inferior Blacks, and the invasion of America by foreign migrants. Amid the shooter’s Great Replacement worries, he leveled accusations of Jewish and globalist cultural contamination and fears of the erosion of white Christian values. George Soros was mentioned.

CPAC speakers in their “under Attack” session were: Balazs Orban, a long-time friend of the American far-right; Francesco Giubilei, writer and head of far-right think tank Nazione Futura, which is close to far-right political party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy); Mark Krikorian, who heads the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant group created by white supremacist John Tanton; Frank Furedi, a Hungarian-British sociologist who rants about “woke” identity politics; and Valerie Huber, an American anti-abortion and pro-abstinence zealot. Their topics were stopping abortion, promoting Christian values (over corrupt, “woke” globalists) and preventing invasions of migrants. It goes without saying that many of the speakers were antisemites. And, of course George Soros was mentioned.

Long before the Buffalo shooter invoked the Great Replacement theory, Viktor Orban enunciated it at his fourth inauguration: “I see the great European population exchange as a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilizations — migrants.”

At the Budapest conference Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union which produces CPAC each year, not only connected Orban’s views on “replacement” with the shooter’s but explained why ending abortion rights was such an important goal of white nationalists: “If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved. […] You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up? If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.”

In a segment called “In God We Trust” the conference pushed white Christian Nationalism masquerading as self-determination. Cynically, or perhaps strategically, CPAC chose an Israeli speaker, Eugene Kontorovich, who shills for a number of right-wing think tanks including the Hoover Institute, to defend Christian Nationalism for all the same reasons he supports Zionism: national self-determination. By Kontorovich’s logic, if 51% of a nation’s citizens are Catholics, Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists, everyone else must be forced to live according to the majority’s belief system.

“Culture Wars in the Media” was up next, featuring, among others: David Reaboi of the Claremont Institute; Matthew Tyrmand from Project Veritas (permanently suspended by Twitter) who is also involved in the “paleoconservative” journal Chronicles magazine; and George Farmer, CEO of Parler (whose app was suspended by Apple and Google) and husband of moon-landing and COVID denier Candace Owens. Hungarian news anchor Balazs Nemeth, who shares Orban’s views of the Ukraine as Hungary’s enemy, discussed fake news in the globalist media.

The following morning’s theme was “The Father is a Man, the Mother is a Woman.” Candace Owens was introduced as “the favorite influencer of Donald Trump.” Antisemite Zsolt Bayer did his thing. Péter Törcsi, who wrote “the Gay lobby has society firmly in its clutches,” also spoke. Birgit Kelle, the author of Gender Gaga, discussed the topics of her book: the ills of hiring quotas for women, liberal relaxations of binary concepts of gender, toilets for trans teens, and liberals whose goal is “the destruction of the family.” Gregor Puppinck, a lawyer who has written numerous attacks on George Soros as well as disputations of democratic rights, particularly abortion as a right, led with abortion. Andrea Földi-Kovács, who survived Orban’s purge of liberal Hungarian TV anchors, frequently slams abortion in her pieces.

Ending the program was Gladen Pappin, who has written that “deracinated, gnostic deformations of Christianity […] can’t sustain a true cultural Christianity, precisely because both the ‘Christianity’ and the culture it engenders are immaterial, disembodied, individualistic — which is to say, perfectly suited to liberal order.”

Forget sissified liberal Christianity; what’s really needed is a muscular, authoritarian-approved version of Christianity stuffed down everybody’s throat — but, of course, for their own good: “It is time for American conservatives to grasp what their European counterparts already know. The deep wellsprings of Christian culture offer a permanent source upon which good government can draw, so that, as the psalmist sings, ‘we may know thy way upon earth: thy salvation in all nations.'”

In fact, American conservatives ought to know what European liberals already know — that fascism hasn’t been particularly good for Europe.

After coffee the theme turned to “Conservative Revival” with talks by: Mark Meadows, Trump’s disgraced Chief of Staff; Rojo Edwards, an American-born Chilean fascist; Spanish fascists Jorge Buxade and Santiago Abascal, from the Vox party; and an authoritarian roundtable.

After lunch the theme was “Homeland, Security.” Maria Schmidt, historian and former Orban advisor, frequently writes about the dangers of socialism. Next up was David Azerrad, who worries too much about changing demographics and who teaches at Hillsdale College, a private Christian college that fights “Critical Race Theory.” As one might expect, Azerrad was not received well when he delivered a speech entitled “Black Privilege and Racial Hysteria” at Saint Vincent College. Then there was Chris Farrell, director of Judicial Watch and a member of the Muslim-bashing Gatestone Institute. He was followed by John Fund, an anti-immigration zealot who claims that undocumented immigrants risk everything to vote illegally. James Wharton, a member of the British Conservative Party and the House of Lords, finished up the session by unctuously praising Orban.

Finishing up the day was “CPACS All Around the World.” The CPAC conference in Hungary was the American Conservative Union’s first stop in a series of international conferences that include Brazil (June 10-11), Mexico (September 2-3), Australia (October 1-2), Japan (December), and South Korea (TBA). Several speakers talked about plans and opportunities in these countries.

The American far right has long had a white Christian nationalist “internationale” in mind. Steve Bannon may be the poster boy for such efforts, having spent the last several years wooing European fascists like France’s Rassemblement National, the Italian far-right, promoting and creating curriculum for the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, an “academy for the Judeo-Christian West” in an Italian monastery, networking with German neo-Nazis, hanging out with the Bolsonaros and other Boys from Brazil — so ardent and so persistent that even Austrian neo-Nazis spurned him. But CPAC’s international conferences, organized by what are now mainstream Republicans, may gain better traction.

Ending the conference were speeches by Laszlo Kover, speaker of the Hungarian national assembly; Jordan Bardella, president of France’s Rassemblement National; Polish nationalist Patryk Jaki, who created legislation making it a crime to suggest Poland was complicit in the Holocaust; retired German academic Werner Patzelt, whose book on the neo-Nazi group PEGIDA showed a bit too much admiration and argued for Germany’s mainstream conservative party, the CDU, to accommodate the far-right; and Jack Posobiec of Turning Point USA, a “Pizzagate” conspiracy nut with innumerable white supremacist connections.

Although the CPAC conference was closed to most U.S. journalists, the full CPAC Hungary program can be found here and online there is an assortment of video clips of the conference.

Hannah Arendt, in her masterful “Origins of Totalitarianism” described perfectly the function of organizations like CPAC: “The world at large […] usually gets its first glimpse of a totalitarian movement through its front organizations. The sympathizers, who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions.”

This is the future of the Republican Party. And if the GOP gains power in the Fall this could also be the dark future of the United States.

Update May 24, 2022 – Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party has neutered the Hungarian Constitution to permit him to rule by decree.

When someone like Payton Gendron walks into a Buffalo supermarket intent on murdering as many Black people as possible it’s natural to want to dismiss him as an outlier, a lone wolf, an aberration.

But, like bacteria on an agar plate, an entire culture of white supremacy landed on Gendron’s petri dish. Rather than being an example of a lone, sick individual, Gendron simply put into motion the genocidal impulses and white supremacist rage that exist within a very sick White America.

Gendron — like New Zealand shooter Brenton Tarrant — invoked the supposed “replacement,” “invasion,” and “genocide” of white people as his rationale for trying to kick off a race war. As many articles published in the aftermath point out, white victimology is a common theme in MAGA politics and particularly immigration policy (see this and this and this and this and this and this and this for starters).

But besides “replacement theory,” I wondered what else was in Gendron’s manifesto. Since over half of it is actually a “how-to kill” guide, I will not link to the full version but to a redacted version here. True, the document is an artifact of an act of terror. But reproducing it does not glorify a twisted ideology so much as it indicts a toxic culture of white nationalism that spawned Payton Gendron. It really should be read.

Similarities with the New Zealand shooter’s 74-page manifesto are obvious: Gendron used the same white supremacist Sonnenrad (also used by the Ukrainian Azov Battalion), the same document structure, and he stole many of Tarrant’s own words. But Gendron’s 180-page document was not just a manifesto but a “how-to” manual for mass murderers.

Over half of his document discusses the pros and cons of certain firearms, weapon modifications, and body armor — as well as where a future killer might obtain such gear. It was shocking to discover how many thousands of dollars this teenager spent on weaponry, how readily available it was, and how its presence failed to raise alarms in a home Gendron shared with his parents and two brothers.

Gendron’s “manifesto” consists of the following sections: a Q&A about his beliefs and motivations (13 pages); his hatred of Black people (10 pages); hatred of Jews (30 pages); Arabs and whites (2 pages); cryptocurrency (2 pages); plans for carrying out his attack (5 pages); a how-to weaponry buying guide (94 pages!); messages to various political groups (2 pages); and his general thoughts, which are basically Tarrant’s (22 pages).

The ten pages devoted to portraying African Americans as a mongrel race are beyond ugly and cite questionable, discredited, and retracted scholarship. One article written by Philippe Rushton in a Canadian psychology journal brought up this disclaimer:

“Although Rushton ceased teaching for the Department of Psychology in the early 1990s, he continued to conduct racist and flawed studies, sometimes without appropriate ethics approval [1], for two more decades. There are other ethical concerns surrounding Rushton’s research. In particular, much of this research was supported by the Pioneer Fund, a foundation formed in 1937 to promote eugenicist and racist goals.”

Another Rushton article Gendron cited had been retracted:

“Rushton and Templer (2012) contend that animal studies show that dark skin pigmentation is reliably related to increased aggression and sexual activity. They speculate that the same may be true in humans, and claim that the psychological literature supports this contention that is grounded in evolutionary theory. Their thesis is that genetic differences, related to darkness of skin colour, explain supposed racial differences in sexual behavior and violence. Both authors are now deceased, and so we cannot speculate about their motivations and intents when publishing this work.”

On the whole, Gendron’s main point is that Blacks are inferior to whites and that, owing to white superiority, coexistence is impossible. People should go back to where they came from — well, everyone except for white people who after all this time might as well be regarded as natives (arguably, indigenous and African-American people have a greater claim here).

One of Gendron’s graphics depicts a mud hut with the nonsense claim that Africans have contributed nothing of value in 6000 years (ignoring Egyptian, Kush, Nok, Aksum, Mali, Songhai, and Zulu civilizations). But isn’t that precisely what Iowa’s white supremacist Congressman Steve King said?

Now, if Black people are simply inferior, then discrimination, structural racism and civil rights violations are all lies. And white privilege too must be a fake and fraud. And, what the hell, let’s turn it around and declare that Black privilege actually exists. And if the Civil Rights movement, or Black Lives Matter, chafes at inequality, well, then it’s simply an abuse of power, an example of [Jewish] propaganda, or reverse racism. Such is the way a white supremacist’s mind works. But, again, how are these views significantly different from Donald Trump’s half century of overt racism? Or Christopher Rufo’s attacks on the reality of white privilege?

Billions of specks of lethal airborne bacteria like Trump’s, King’s, Rufo’s and Rushton’s, and toxic particles from discredited studies like the Moynihan Report which blamed Black Americans for their own mistreatment, continually swirl around in the American atmosphere, eventually settling on the agar plates that grow citizens like Payton Gendron.

Perhaps not totally unexpected was the vehemence of Gendron’s antisemitism. If you are a white supremacist who believes African-Americans have no intellect and no agency but you are also a conspiracy nut, then you need to blame someone for all the world’s problems. And what better people than Jews?

But now we have stumbled upon the white supremacist’s dilemma: if both are enemies, but Blacks are completely inept, how do Jews and Blacks together create so much misery for god-fearing white Christians? Simple: Blacks are simply a Jewish tool for dividing white America.

“‘The elite’, ‘The 1%’, ‘The bankers’, ‘The capitalists’, (((them))), ‘The marxist’s’ they all refer to the same group: THE JEWS!! […] The real war I’m advocating for is the gentiles vs the Jews. We outnumber them 100x, and they are not strong by themselves. But by their Jewish ways, they turn us against each other. When you realize this you will know that the Jews are the biggest problem the Western world has ever had. They must be called out and killed, if they are lucky they will be exiled. We can not show any sympathy towards them again.”

Note that “they turn us against each other” is precisely the same formulation that MAGA Republicans have chosen to justify bans on teaching CRT or acknowledging LGBTQ+ realities. To the white supremacist mind, “globalists” — not America’s social inequities themselves — are responsible for sowing division, and this has apparently necessitated bans on “divisive concepts” in schools throughout America.

If you can’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist.

Gendron actually spent three times the pages describing “Jewish ways” than he did African-American “inferiority.” I won’t reproduce his crudest images — especially the one with the Hitler quote — but he used cartoons depicting a Jew stuffing African-Americans down the throats of non-Jews, another poisoning the well of white culture, and another identifying “Jews” as a stand-in for anyone with power or influence. And, if course, they are responsible for most of the problems of the Western world:

“The Jews are responsible for many problems that we in the western world face today. They will stop at nothing to ensure that they have full control over the goyim. The most common way the Jew does this is by weakening us with their propaganda. Since they mostly own mainstream media, this is easy. They will create infighting between our people and races so we are fighting each other rather than them. For example, currently the Jews are spreading ideas such as Critical Race Theory and white shame/guilt to brainwash Whites into hating themselves and their people. For our self-preservation, the Jews must be removed from our Western civilizations, in any way possible. I should also mention that not all “Jews” are ethnic or religious Jews. Jeff Bezos for example is not a religious or ethnic Jew, but may be considered a Jew. All elitists and globalists may be considered a “Jew” simply because they act like one.”

Funny he should mention Critical Race Theory. If you have read any of Christopher Rufo’s anti-CRT materials, you will recognize the same Christian nationalist bacilli that ended up on Gendron’s agar plate. Christian nationalist animus toward “globalists” and “elites” betrays its origins in classical antisemitism.

Another graphic implies that African-Americans were not bright enough to create the NAACP themselves (in fact, its primary founder, W.E.B. DuBois, was arguably the brightest of them all), and that the NAACP was not only a Jewish tool but a Communist plot.

According to Gendron, Jews are responsible for pornography, abortion, the grooming of gay kids, and converting children from potential Christian breeders into atheist transsexuals. This is apparently a plot to reduce white Christian demographics. Gendron wrote that he learned the “truth” of all this from following 4Chan, World Truth Videos, Daily Archives, and the Daily Stormer.

The mass-murderer’s choice of neo-Nazi websites may at first appear to be a departure from more mainstream MAGA news and opinion sources like the Federalist, WorldNet Daily or the Daily Blaze. But they all share precisely the same white supremacist and Christian nationalist preoccupations with Communists, “globalists,” Eurocentrism, and rejecting any acknowledgement of the racist society we live in.

But white supremacy is not just for MAGA Republicans.

Ajamu Baraka, contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report, tied together the Buffalo massacre with the concierge service that NATO (and naturally the present Democratic administration) has shown a white European nation — in contrast to their 2011 invasion of Libya:

“Zelensky talks about the need to ‘defend the West,’ ‘Europeanness,’ ‘Western values,’ and the liberal/left does not recognize the inherent assumptions of white supremacy in those terms. But Payton Gendron did and [that] is why he enlisted in Zelensky’s fight not in Ukraine but in the middle of an African American community.”

It is ironic that American Liberals, in embracing eurocentric chauvinism in the Ukraine via relaxed immigration caps and steroid-infused defense spending not offered on this scale to any other country, are on exactly the same page as MAGA Republicans celebrating their own eurocentric white chauvinism at their CPAC convention in Hungary.

Baraka connects all the dots:

“Buffalo closes the loop that connects crude white supremacy with its more polished and dangerous expression. Both of these versions represent a consensus that is committed to using force and violence to ensure that white power will not be ‘replaced.’ This new consensus has created the ideological foundation for the legitimation of a cross-class white supremacist defense of something called European values and the interests of Europe.”

All of which raises the question: if the GOP is based on white supremacy, and white Liberals won’t reject the inherent white chauvinism and white supremacy in their own foreign policy, how can Democrats ever hope to fight the cruder versions from the GOP?

Race and sexuality.

At first these two words seem to have no connection. But ask yourself why both were woven into the racist “chivalry” that the Confederacy cobbled together from Sir Walter Scott’s novels and tales of German nobility — or why race and sexuality were invariably connected in lynchings of Black men accused of talking to white women. Ask yourself why — long after slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow — there were still laws on the books against miscegenation. Ask yourself why racial purity and misogyny are so abundant in far-right groups.

Now ask yourself why men like Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz were so fixated upon and could so easily segue between race and sexuality when they tried to put the first Black woman ever nominated to the Supreme Court “in her place.”

Republicans, in their heart of hearts, their dream of dreams, relish the power that white slave masters exercised over people who their slave laws decreed were property — some whose wombs they made property through sexual violence. Slave owners’ wives were property as well, and woe to a woman who cast an admiring, or simply a kind, glance at a Black man.

Male white ownership and control of both race and sexuality was implicit in slavery. The use of religion to establish the “proper place” for both women and Blacks was also implicit. As a system of production by slaves optimized by the production of more slaves, slavery had no use for unproductive sex and relied on selective bible readings which condemned homosexuality.

You don’t have to be a scholar to read for yourself some of the perversions of scripture Southern clergymen came up with to justify slavery. Apologists for the “peculiar institution” were just as prolific as abolitionists. Project Gutenberg has a great (and free) collection you can access online.

In one Gutenberg collection entitled “Cotton is King” Mississippi clergyman E.N. Elliott defended slavery by denying it had anything to do with ownership of human bodies; no, he wrote, it involved a relationship established by God.

But many such defenses of slavery were equally bizarre or inhuman. S.A. Cartwright MD, writing in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, stated with absolute certainty that “the physiological fact that negroes consume less oxygen indicates the superior wisdom of the precepts [enslavement] taught in the Bible regarding those people.“

As to beating slaves, “You hear of the poor negroes […] being beaten with many stripes by their masters and overseers. But owing to the fact that they consume less oxygen than white people, and the other physical differences founded on difference of structure” … well, they can hardly feel it, Cartwright concluded.

The denial of Black humanity was echoed by Chancellor Harper of South Carolina, who wrote, “Will those who regard slavery as immoral, or crime in itself, tell us that man was not intended for civilization, but to roam the earth as a biped brute?”

Intentionally or not, Harper spilled the beans on the real reason that slavery existed — simple Capitalist greed. In fact, Marx couldn’t have expressed it any better:

“Property–the accumulation of capital, as it is commonly called–is the first element of civilization. But to accumulate, or to use capital to any considerable extent, the combination of labor is necessary. In early stages of society, when people are thinly scattered over an extensive territory, the labor necessary to extensive works cannot be commanded. Men are independent of each other. Having the command of abundance of land, no one will submit to be employed in the service of his neighbor. No one, therefore, can employ more capital than he can use with his own hands, or those of his family, nor have an income much beyond the necessaries of life. There can, therefore, be little leisure for intellectual pursuits, or means of acquiring the comforts or elegancies of life. It is hardly necessary to say, however, that if a man has the command of slaves, he may combine labor, and use capital to any required extent, and therefore accumulate wealth.”

Dr. [of Theology] Anthea Butler, in her great little book “White Evangelical Racism,” describes the long history of misuse of religion to justify slavery. She acknowledges the diversity and complexity of white Evangelicals, noting that some later participated in the Civil Rights movement.

But when Republicans pushed their “Southern strategy” and wooed formerly Democratic white Evangelicals with dog-whistles — if not overt racist appeals — the seduction was too easy. Republicans were offering white Evangelicals something they had long desired — political power.

In an interview with Religion & Politics, Butler explained, “It’s not just that the movement is led by a bunch of white guys. It’s that there is a cultural whiteness at the heart of evangelicalism that anyone who enters the community has to receive. I try to show, from Billy Graham onward, how this inherent whiteness works, often by way of color blindness. Officially, evangelicalism claims to be committed to a series of beliefs and values that are higher than and so uninvested in questions of race, and yet their political conservatism really seems to limit their tolerance for non-white input, even from peers and leaders who share their belief system.”

Butler links white paternalism in the home, on the plantation, and in American foreign policy: “In the Reconstruction period, the ‘Religion of the Lost Cause’ lamented the end of slavery and asserted that Black people were inferior. The missionary movement asserted that foreigners were ‘heathen’ in need of civilization, which was invariably couched in white expressions of Christianity.”

As white Christian Nationalist assaults on secular society mount, it is not surprising that almost all involve the twin Republican obsessions of race and sexuality. Ground zero today is the nation’s schools, where Republicans attack diversity curriculum and district efforts to make schools safe and welcoming places for gay and trans students.

January 6th should have been a wake-up call, but we are failing to take the threat that white Christian Nationalism poses to democracy seriously. Within a generation the Republican Party has become an openly proto-fascist political organization based on white Christian Nationalism. Republican political institutions like CPAC openly flirt with European fascists. Many of its members are white supremacists who make no effort to conceal their neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi sympathies.

And why should they? This is exactly what Republicans now stand for.

Like compulsive gamblers, spouse abusers, and alcoholics, White America has a racism problem it refuses to acknowledge. People with problems like these often tell their relatives that they either don’t have the problem — or that it’s actually the fault of family members. Interventions rarely go well. More often than not, families don’t even intervene. This is precisely how White America deals with racism: it doesn’t.

On Wednesday Tim Scott, a Black Republican Senator from South Carolina, went on air following Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress to deliver the Republican response. Although for four years Scott rarely objected to any of Trump’s numerous racist Tweets or cruel executive orders, he attacked Biden for “pulling us further apart” in a matter of 100 days.

White Republicans no doubt enjoyed watching a Black member of their party doing their dirty work for them, defending a party that is 89% white, rushing to institute new Jim Crow voter suppression policies in dozens of states, trying to crush protests over police killings through new and likely unconstitutional laws, writing laws to protect people who run over BLM protestors or get liberal teachers fired, and enacting “religious protection” laws mainly to privilege White Christians.

These mint julep sipping White Republicans must have especially enjoyed watching Scott dutifully delivered the line: “Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.” The Senator took some well-deserved heat for his nonsensical talking points. Michael Harriot, writing in the Root, tore Scott a couple of new orifices, laying out just how ridiculous Scott’s denial of a racist White America really is.

Of course, Democrats didn’t want to upset America’s racist white majority either, so they mouthed precisely the same words. Vice President Kamala Harris told Good Morning America, “No, I don’t think America is a racist country.” And on the Today Show President Joe Biden said those words as well, suggesting that racism of the past has left wreckage in its wake: “but I think after 400 years African Americans have been left in a position where they are so far behind the eight ball in terms of education and health, in terms of opportunity.”

In an editorial on WBSM’s website, local bloviator Barry Richard not only rejected white racism but hung the label of racist on those who acknowledge its reality. “I think the real racists are the ones who call racism at every turn. They see racism under every bed and around every corner.” That, of course means most Liberals and most Black people — except for Scott and Candace Owens.

But there’s really not enough distance between Richard and Biden here. Neither want to confront a meth head relative with his problem. And neither is ready to insist on a family intervention.

With such glaring inequities in policing, prosecution, incarceration, housing, education, wealth, health, political power, and longevity, playing semantic games and trying to deny reality is a dangerous game. America has a serious white supremacy problem that neither Republicans nor Democrats want to address. Like any disease, if left untreated the patient is going to die. We’re not going to make it as a country unless we go into rehab immediately. But that requires first acknowledging that you’ve got a problem.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, there are now 253 pieces of legislation in 43 states that limit voting rights and access. A massive voting rights bill, H.R.1 – For the People Act of 2021, was just passed in the House and is now before the U.S. Senate.

Republicans predictably oppose the legislation because expanding voting hours, access to the polls, and absentee ballots cost them dearly in 2020. To preserve their power in Red States and return to glory in Blue ones, they need to put a serious crimp in the last exercise of democracy available to most Americans. The Heritage Foundation has already promised to take H.R.1 to the Supreme Court if it manages to survive a filibuster, claming that it violates the Constitution.

When the Arizona Republican Party went before the Supreme Court to defend ballot disqualification in that state, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked what the party’s interest was in such measures. The party’s lawyer, Michael Carvin, answered a little too candidly: “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”

GovTrack.us predicts that H.R.1 has an 87% chance of being enacted. But some Democratic Senators are on the fence. None of the 8 Democrats who opposed the $15 per hour minimum wage have signed on to H.R.1, and fivethirtyeight.com names two of them — Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — as weak on opposing voter suppression.

If you think voter suppression is found only in states where not so long ago lynchings took place, or if you think voter suppression is a strategy only Republicans can love — well, you would be wrong on both counts. Massachusetts is one of this states.

Here are some of the bills now before the 192nd General Court of the Massachusetts Legislature. Read the bills, identify the sponsors, and then help get them out of office.

• HD.503 – sponsored by Colleen Garry (D-36th Middlesex) and others of both parties
• HD.642 – sponsored by Donald R. Berthiaume (R-5th Worcester).
• HD.1349 – sponsored by Alyson Sullivan (R-7th Plymouth)
• HD.1393 – sponsored by Mark Lombardo (R-22nd Middlesex) and Nicholas Boldyga (R-3rd Hampden)
• HD.2703 – sponsored by Lenny Mirra (R-2nd Essex)
• SD.1096 – sponsored by Barry Finegold (D-2nd Essex and Middlesex). Barry Finegold’s bill purports to expand voting rights but contain provisions which do the opposite, which may be why it is included on the Brennan list.

Dec 10 March for Voting Rights by Michael Fleshman under CC BY-SA 2.0

Trump’s second impeachment was, precisely as Republicans termed it, a show trial. Though it was not of the Stalinist variety, in which the full fury of a despotic regime is turned on the innocent. No, the Democratic impeachment managers, to the contrary, mounted a moving, professionally staged version of To Kill a Mockingbird in which prosecutors attempted to defend the Constitution. Jamie Raskin, reprising the role of Atticus Finch, mounted a convincing case and delivered an uplifting summation. But it fell on deaf ears of the GOP and the client, Justice, was condemned precisely like Finch’s client, Tom Robinson.

In the end, though, the Senate impeachment trial was nothing more than theater.

It hadn’t helped that the Democrats backed down at the last minute and refused to call witnesses. It hadn’t helped that several of the Maycomb, Alabama jurors — Klan members themselves — had been huddling with opposing counsel. It hadn’t helped that the impeachment process, as designed by the framers of the Constitution, is a joke. So much of a joke that during Trump’s first impeachment trial humor columnist Andy Borowitz joked that when El Chapo found out how impeachment trials were actually conducted he was outraged that his had witnesses!

This staged performance did reveal how broken the United States Constitution is. Operating precisely as designed, the Constitution shields America’s rulers from the whims of the little people. In addition to its broken courts, its broken presidency, its toothless House, and the highly undemocratic Electoral College, we have all seen in the last year alone how a partisan Senate can destroy accountability by any other branch of government. Indeed, the Senate is American democracy’s Achilles heel.

The almost religious reverence for the founders of the Constitution, who as Senator Ted Cruz put it, “fought and bled for freedom and then crafted the most miraculous political document ever conceived, our Constitution,” should really be questioned. The system they created is not merely showing its age. It’s just not working.

After the Senate’s impeachment theater, President Biden issued a bland statement lamenting the “trial” as a “sad chapter in our history” and naming the defense of truth the solution to re-uniting the United States.

But our problems go well beyond truth, as Atticus Finch might have argued — to recognizing and overturning centuries of white impunity. Not to mention ditching our dysfunctional form of government through a Constitutional convention — that is, before it self-destructs.

Speaking for many of us, Elie Mystal wrote in The Nation: “I Don’t Just Want Trump Impeached. I Want Him Jailed.” Mystal pointed to the racial injustices of recent arrests and selective prosecutions by courts, courts and legislators unwilling to pursue the many counts against Trump from the Mueller investigation and, finally, to the coup attempt that had no consequences.

Los Angeles Times editors have called for a Department of Justice investigation, impeachment or not. Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway suggested that the DOJ appoint a special counsel, a view shared by former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti. And New York Magazine ran a piece reminding readers of what the prosecution of a former leader might look like: in 2012 Italy prosecuted its former authoritarian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, a man very much like Trump, on a host of charges ranging from sex with an underaged prostitute to bribery and tax fraud, even sentencing him to jail.

Although President Biden told the National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists last August that he would not stand in the way of prosecuting Trump, in the next breath he said that it would be a “very unusual thing and probably not very … good for democracy.” By November Biden was telling advisors that prosecuting Trump wasn’t even an option. “I will not do what this president does and use the Justice Department as my vehicle to insist that something happened.”

Maybe Biden believes he can create bipartisan results, or even save the House from a Republican take-back in 2022. Maybe he thinks appeasing members of a party, 40% of whom believe in political violence, will brake what some see as an inevitable [cold?] Civil War. Good luck, Mr. President, but you’re kidding yourself.

But for all his reticence to prosecute a seditionist coup plotter, Biden still plans to pursue the extradition and prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for publishing evidence of American war crimes. We may eventually get that Stalinist show trial after all.

Since being almost completely exiled from mainstream Social Media networks after his failed coup attempt, people are asking where Donald Trump has gone. Some Americans are actually experiencing withdrawal symptoms from the absence of Trump’s daily crack pipe.

Along with Trump, many of his unhinged supporters have been banned from Twitter, Facebook, and others. But this has just inflamed white grievance and their warped perception that white racists are the real victims. Conservatives have been treating the 25,000 National Guard troops at the Capitol as a sort of Tiananmen Square moment, and their exile from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has now become, for them, the American imposition of the Great Chinese Firewall. While these developments are no such thing, they are overreach and overkill, and Liberals proceed down the road of heavy-handedness at their own, great peril.

So where has the Far Right and all their sewage gone? To answer that question I did a little sewer diving, and here is what I found.

Donald Trump can now be found on Gab and Telegram, although he is rumored to be toying with the idea of creating his own social network — which, based on the history of Trump Water, Trump Steaks, and Trump University, may not end so well. Trump has established an Office of the Former President, which so far does not have a website but did announce its existence on Telegram.

Telegram, a messaging service with channels that users can subscribe to as easily as Twitter, has recently attracted a large number of Far Right voices. They include familiar names like Trump himself, former First Heirs Ivanka and Don Jr., Steve Bannon, Dinesh D’Souza, Sheriff David Clarke, Michelle Malkin, Laura Loomer, Ben Shapiro, Rush Limbaugh, Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk, Breitbart News, Project Veritas, Turning Point USA, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, Right Side Broadcasting, Epoch Times, the Bannon War Room, One America News, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Rudy Giuliani, Jack Prosobiec, Scott Presler, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kayleigh McEnany, Andy Biggs, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Ted Cruz, Devin Nunes, Lindsey Graham, Jim Jordan, and others.

American Conservatives frequently supplement an unhealthy, unholy diet with intravenous vitamin drips from QAnon’s Q-Tip, the Boogaloo Boys Intel Drop, the Daily Groyper, and other white supremacist groups. These supplements are entirely unncessary because American Conservatives have been getting far more than their minimum daily requirements of fascism, nazism, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, and white supremacy for many years. And the content, it is important to note, is not all that different from the more “mainstream” Conservative views.

Other “victims” of internet moderation have moved to Parler, though it has been unable (or at least slow) to reload its Amazon cloud data to a new site. While inspired by mainstream Republicans, the January 6th coup was coordinated via social networking by extremists, and Parler was instrumental in the effort. With YouTube cracking down on hate speech, Rumble has become the go-to site for uploading videos filled with hate speech and conspiracies.

Since the pandemic, Liberals have been calling for more “moderation” (if not outright censorship) of crackpots spreading dangerous information. For their part, “mainstream” Republicans have been getting nuttier and more extreme. A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that the “Capitol Insurrection Shows How Trends On The Far-Right’s Fringe Have Become Mainstream.” This belated revelation has frightened even the GOP. Today RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel distanced herself from election conspiracies Rudy Guilani delivered from RNC offices, wondering “what is the liability of the RNC, if [Giuliani’s] allegations are made and unfounded?” It will be interesting to see if the “moderate” wing of the Republican Party will join Democrats in calling for forms of internet censorship.

Yesterday the New York Times published an article called The Coup We Are Not Talking About by Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Zuboff, to her credit, faults surveillance capitalism for monetizing data that ought to be protected from “data mining” by internet services like Google or Palantir. She also faults surveillance capitalism for selling or patriotically donating that data to America’s vast security state. Zuboff is in favor of anti-trust actions to break up large, dangerous monopolies. And Zuboff is also a strong proponent of privacy legislation to protect citizens from facial recognition and other forms of exploitation of personal data.

But Zuboff is also in favor of measures that go well beyond regulation into governmental intrusions into the proprietary algorithms that search engines use, “comprehensive audits” (whatever that means), and most frightening of all — copying European laws like the British Online Harms Bill, which make companies responsible for “public harms.”

The American Security Establishment (NSA, CIA, FBI, DOJ, DHS, etc.) has long demanded weakened encryption protocols in order to “protect Americans from harm” by snooping on everything transmitted over the internet. But, of course, one person’s “harm” is another’s freedom. If Wikileaks offers a roadmap for what’s coming, censorship and persecution based on “public harm” will soon extend to more whistleblowers the government doesn’t like and those espousing unpopular sentiments, such as defunding police, burning flags, or socializing Medicine.

This is the slippery slope that Zuboff — and many Liberals — want to descend.

At the heart of the “censorship” (or “moderation”) debate is compromise language inserted into the 1996 Communications Decency Act. One section, 47 U.S. Code § 230 — “Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material” — does two main things: (1) it holds internet providers harmless from prosecution for inflammatory or libelous posts by their customers; and (2) it also holds internet providers harmless from lawsuits by their customers if they attempt to block or censor inflammatory or libelous content posted on their platforms.

Liberals and Conservatives both hate Section 230 — for different reasons. Liberals don’t want to hear hate speech and they don’t care much about the Civil Liberties implications of censorship. Conservatives don’t mind hate speech, or they routinely traffic in it, and they too don’t really care about the Civil Liberties implications.

Former president Donald Trump wanted to repeal Section 230, going so far as to threaten to veto the National Defense Authorization act if 230 were not revoked. And our new president is on the same side of the issue. When asked one year ago by the New York Times what he thinks of Section 230, candidate Joe Biden betrayed his ignorance of the law, saying, “[The Times] can’t write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But [Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg] can. […] And [Section 230] should be revoked. It should be revoked because [Facebook] is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false, and we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy.”

Trump’s and Biden’s views are shared by a large bipartisan crowd from Nancy Pelosi to Josh Hawley, and by Centrist Democrats and even a few progressives.

But as Ars Technica internet policy reporter Timothy B. Lee explains, “Biden is wrong to suggest that Section 230 treats Facebook differently from The New York Times. If someone posts a defamatory comment in the comment section of a Times article, the company enjoys exactly the same legal immunity that Facebook gets for user posts. Conversely, if Facebook published a defamatory article written by an employee, it would be just as liable as the Times.”

Those who want to impose more censorship (“moderation”) forget that if legislators can constrain internet freedom of speech, then constraints on print and broadcast media could easily be next.

In September 2020 former Attorney General William Barr weighed in on revoking and/or revising Section 230. One of Barr’s rationales was to permit more federal “oversight” of internet content and to give prosecutors greater latitude to prosecute indecency, terrorism, cyber-stalking, and “illicit content.” Barr also wanted backdoors into social networks and encryption keys the government could use to snoop on internet traffic.

But Barr also wanted changes that held online publishers like Twitter and Facebook to their own Acceptable Use policies — not arbitrary, capricious decisions to permit one user to abuse published policies while banning another:

“Section 230 […] should not hinder free speech by making platforms completely unaccountable for moderation decisions. A platform that chooses not to host certain types of content would not be required to do so, but it must act in good faith and abide by its own terms of service and public representations. Platforms that fail to do those things should not enjoy the benefits of Section 230 immunity. [My] proposal adds a provision§ 230(c)(l)(C) to make clear that online platforms can continue to take down content in good faith and consistent with their terms of service without automatically becoming a publisher or speaker of all other content on their service.”

As much as I revile William Barr, this last suggestion made more sense than convoluted and antidemocratic proposals to enforce “good citizenship” and “prevent harm” through what can only in the end be called by its proper name: censorship.

Legal remedies for willfully spreading lies, slandering or threatening people, or cyber-stalking already exist. Dominion Voting Machines had the right idea when it slapped Rudy Giuliani with a $1.3 billion lawsuit. And guess what? Fears of further liability from Giulani’s lying seem to have gotten Ronna McDaniel’s attention, too.

Ultimately it is up to laws to correct these injustices and to prosecutors to go after internet crime. But if the FBI can only muster the half-hearted prosecution of white supremacist coup plotters, and no one ever attempts to stop the steady stream of interstate phone scams ringing our phones at dinnertime, you can bet that new laws will also be enforced selectively, or not at all.

Liberals believe that the toxicity of the internet is responsible for the January 6th coup attempt. It seems to escape their notice that it was rallying calls by the former president, aided and abetted by numerous speakers and Far Right organizations who showed up on Pennsylviania Avenue on January 6th to urge a mob to lay siege to the Capitol. It was Republican legislators who conducted prohibited tours of the Capitol, informing the plotters where Democratic offices were located, where the safe rooms and tunnels could be found, and about the emergency signals in Congressional offices.

It was Trump’s Acting defense Secretary Christopher Miller who issued “stand down” orders to the National Guard, and the Metro Police. It was Miller who barred the use of weapons, air support, surveillance, who limited National Guard troops to 340 people, who basically de-fanged the police against a violent insurrectionist mob. If we really want to look at how the coup attempt could have been prevented, don’t look at censoring social media — which merely echoed the false claims of Trump and his Congressional co-conspirators — but to those who called the mob to “stand by” and then on the day of the siege urged them to go to war.

Once again, existing law is quite capable of holding plotters and seditionists responsible. But enforcement of existing law is always a matter of political will.

Finally, no matter the medium, there has always been a steady stream of crazy, racist sewage Americans consume, and it will continue to be produced even if its authors must resort to using mimeograph machines again. If we pursue the recommendations of people like Ms. Zuboff, William Barr, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden to attack social networks instead of pursuing prosecutions, we will punish the public instead of coup plotters. And we will still have failed to fix the white supremacy at the heart of the coup attempt — while irrevocably destroying what’s left of our democracy.

In the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency all hell was breaking loose. A friend, equally alarmed at what seemed on the surface to be a national break with reality and severe psychosis, recommended Four Threats by Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman. It was a good read and I don’t regret the time spent with it. The publisher’s blurb is a solid summary of what the book attempted to present:

In Four Threats, Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman explore five moments in history when democracy in the U.S. was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound — even fatal — damage to the American democratic experiment. From this history, four distinct characteristics of disruption emerge. (1) Political polarization, (2) racism and nativism, (3) economic inequality, and (4) excessive executive power — alone or in combination — have threatened the survival of the republic, but it has survived — so far. What is unique, and alarming, about the present moment in American politics is that all four conditions exist.

Despite its promise to get to the root of our democratic rot, Four Threats could not bring itself to name the primary cause of economic inequality — capitalism. Four Threats could not bring itself to indict the Constitution itself for the gridlock, frustration, dysfunction, and attenuated democracy that perpetuates political polarization. Mettler and Lieberman acknowledge unequal representation of the Senate, the undemocratic Electoral College, but then they just throw up their hands:

“These and other features of the Constitution certainly do make American politics less democratic because they render elections less fair and discourage accountability to the majority of citizens. Many have made cogent calls for them to be changed. But such changes are unlikely to happen. Amending the Constitution is difficult under the best of circumstances, and probably next to impossible in today’s polarized climate. Moreover, those in power are the beneficiaries of current constitutional arrangements, so they have little incentive to change them. As beneficial as some of these reforms might be for American democracy, we need to look elsewhere in the short term to restore democracy’s promise.”

The book never takes us to that “elsewhere.”

In their impassioned plea to save democracy, the authors cite a Pew opinion survey showing that Conservatives and Liberals both share a strong commitment to democracy. But they ignore the glaring fact that today’s Conservatives have quite a different notion of democracy than the rest of us. Conservative “democracy” more resembles Margaret Atwood’s Gilead than the Iowa caucuses.

In order to deal with polarization, Mettler and Lieberman argue, we need dialog. We need to talk openly about issues that really matter, with the preservation of democracy in mind, and cognizent that we have not yet extended democracy to all. It’s a sweet, noble — and damned naive — sentiment. One wonders if the authors have personally ever tried to argue for democracy for everyone with a white supremacist, listened dispassionately to conspiracy nuts hoping for a “storm” to usher in mass executions, or tried to agree on facts with people who don’t believe in science or in protecting fellow citizens by using face masks?

Four Threats was empty of the pragmatic prescriptions promised when discounting more radical solutions. Changing the Constitution? Why not? Letting the South secede? Bringing down the entire corrupt system through national strikes or protest in order to rebuild something that actually works? Again, why not? We’re long past the point that we need to place a “do not resuscitate” notation in the patient’s chart. Software is periodically refactored, shacks are bulldozed to make way for more solid structures. We even change our underwear. Why the hell not government?

An especially glaring omission in Four Threats was its failure to address American imperialism — a factor responsible for much of 20th and 21st century executive overreach. The Bush administration’s dismantling of Constitutional laws and norms, for example, were not sufficiently covered in the book, as they were in Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. We are still living with global surveillance, an American gulag, secret courts, and violations of several of the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution.

While Four Threats to its credit spends time on Reonstruction and touches on Jim Crow, it never really indicts White America itself for white supremacy. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law provides a similarly dispassionate look at the institutions of white supremacy. But we [white folks] created this system, and if you really want to understand where it came from Carol Anderson’s White Rage will gladly hand you a mirror.

To truly understand the Capitol riots, read Carol Anderson. White America can never stand for an improvement in the status or power of Black Americans. So when Georgia turned the tides of the 2020 presidential election and thwarted control of the Senate by America’s openly white supremacist party, that was a bridge too far for White America. It was White Rage we were witnessing at the Capitol, threatening to bring down the entire national project. It very well could have, and they’ve promised to bring their guns next time.

Mettler’s and Lieberman’s blindness to the profound perversity of America’s citizens is possibly the book’s worst deficit. Why do snake oil and bible salesmen repeatedly prey upon — and originate in — White America? We fancy ourselves a nation of dreamers and builders, but in fact we are a nation of deranged, self-destructive, science-denying, racist, hating, religious fanatics. Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: Who America Went Haywire makes the case that this insanity is embedded in our national DNA. So if you think the violent mobs you saw on the news on January 6th were something new and unexpected, just read Andersen’s profiles of those who built this country.

This is who we are.

In my almost 70 years on this planet, this is my first American coup. And I had been thinking that 2020 was the interesting year. I was certainly wrong.

I was going to write about the similarities between last Wednesday’s coup attempt and its precedents in the Munich coup of 1923 or Mussolini’s March on Rome in October 1922. I though I might mention that the Mar-a-Lago Führer had long been fascinated by his fascist forebears, even keeping a copy of Hitler’s collected speeches in his nightstand, a fact confirmed by multiple sources including Trump himself.

It occurred to me I should also mention the differences between these coups — that, unlike Trump’s 2021 attempt, the Munich police actually fought the 3,000 Bierkeller fascists, killing a number of them. Instead, it was reported today that off-duty police from around the country may have participated in Trump’s attempt to derail the certification of Electoral College votes and physically intimidate lawmakers.

Or that Capitol police, some who appeared in selfies with the mob, appear to have actually invited the insurrection into chambers, some armed, some carrying plastic ties to take lawmakers hostage, some erecting gallows, fixin’ to lynch the Vice President and House and Senate leaders. Videos show police actually opening the doors. And now we read that the deployment of Maryland National Guard troops may have been slow-walked by Trump loyalists in the Pentagon. There are a lot of questions to be answered in the investigations I hope are coming.

Unlike Mussolini, who triumphantly entered Rome with his fellow blackshirts, Trump retreated back to his bunker for another cheeseburger, despite promising the mob he would be marching with them. Unfortunately, America’s First Fascist didn’t even show the courtesy of committing suicide in his bunker like the man whose speeches he loves so much.

But who can say today that they were really suprised by this coup — coming from a man whose administration built concentration camps for children, proposed putting DACA recipients in boxcars and shipping them out of the country, never once distancing himself from his white supremacist base and in fact speaking for them? Who could say they were truly suprised at any of this — from a man who managed to corrupt everyone around him and never once encountered anything but impunity for even the most treasonous actions?

Yet what upsets me the most are the reactions the coup attempt has provoked.

Even after four years of the most egregious corruption and authoritarianism, the mainstream press still finds it difficult to pronounce Trump’s attempt to prevent the counting of Electoral College votes a failed coup. Instead, this retrospectively ham-handed effort is variously described as an insurrection or a riot — as if it were a fraternity party or a Superbowl celebration that got out of hand.

It was, of course, no such thing.

I had planned to mention that the all-too-frequently published photo of the Norseman with his spear provided an undeserved comic veneer to what was actually a deadly coup that cost the life of six people, including two Capitol police officers. Anyone who watches the videos now surfacing understands that many of the participants thought they were part of a “revolution” liberating Congress, just as they had been instructed to “liberate” state capitals by the President.

Despite all this, Republicans have refused to invoke the 25th Amendment and we now hear from Jim Clyburn that Democrats will likely conduct an impeachment inquiry 100 days into the Biden administration. Some voices gravely warn us that pursuing justice at all will only divide the country.

In the face of all this bending-over-backwards to avoid prosecuting white supremacists and rich white guys, the only concrete response to Trump’s coup has been for three social network giants to de platform Parler, the far right version of Twitter, and to ban Trump himself from Facebook and Twitter. There is a long precedent for this. Facebook, Google, and Twitter have been cancelling accounts of terrorists since 9/11, and telecom giants have on occasion blocked entire websites like Wikileaks. Social networks — precisely like members of the Trump administration now writing their resignation letters — simply didn’t care about lies, white supremacy or the threats of violence they suborned until they were forced to care.

But punishing one undemocratic action with another is not going to fix what’s wrong with American democracy.

Trump’s calls to invade the Capitol and disrupt the Electoral College ought to have had immediate consequences. But those who swore to uphold the Constitution violated those oaths. A bunch of pitchfork-wielding white supremacists — even when calling for lynching — apparently did not alarm authorities as much as BLM’s calls for police reform this Spring. Support for overturning the Electoral College vote from Republican legislators like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz should also have set off alarm bells. Well-telegraphed plans to disrupt the election should have resulted in immediate investigations and extra protection for Congress members. Instead, impunity for legislators driving and supporting the coup and violating free speech for everyone else are the only solutions we can come up with.

If overturning the results of a democratic election has no consequences, if coup attempts are trivialized and any thought of prosecuting ringleaders is not pursued, then autocracy will have won.

There have to be consequences for last Wednesday’s coup attempt. People must serve some serious time in prison for it, including the President, several Senators and a number of Congressmen, and thousands of white supremacists and conspiracy nuts who broke into Congress and attempted to crush police to death. Some of these spineless Congressmen are now blaming their actions on their own constituents. Michigan Republican Representative Peter Meijer claimed that many Republicans went along with the President’s attempt to subvert the election because their constituents had threatened them.

But if none of these instigators, ringleaders, or the organizations responsible for ground operations are held accountable, then let’s simply open the nation’s prisons — which contain tens of thousands serving life sentences for trivial drug and property offenses. Seriously, just let them go. If there are no consequences for ringleaders of a large-scale coup to overturn an elected government-in-waiting, then why should there be any consequences for a guy who arrested with a little too much weed on him?

The American Constitution has made many of the anti-democratic maneuvers we’ve seen in the last four years possible, granting excessive power to the Executive, undermining fair elections that everyone must have faith in — and these are all worries of both Liberals and Conservatives. It’s something we should all agree on.

If we really want to fix our democracy, we must start by rewriting the awful rule book that governs its operation.

First line

It’s hard to know what Massachusetts Democrats really believe in — besides power. One would be hard-pressed to find a lot of concern for racial justice. MassDems certainly don’t believe in immigrant rights, or they would have supported the Safe Communities Act. They don’t believe there is a problem with Native American mascots or a racists state flag, or they would have decisively fixed both by now. Recently the MassDems overwhelmingly re-elected a party chair who will keep steering the party toward the rocks of irrelevance and decline. When the 420-member state Democratic committee did so, it also rejected two challengers who had both pledged to make the party truly more diverse.

Massachusetts Democrats show unquestioning support for police and correctional officer unions — even the Trump-iest among them, the Massachusetts Correctional Officers Federated Union, got one progressive senator to file legislation to give officers a $100 million raise. No, what keeps legislators up at night is the nightmare that prosecuting bad cops for murdering people of color will somehow undermine police morale.

No surprise, then, that Massachusetts Democrats removed ending Qualified Immunity (impunity) for police from a Police Accountability bill that just barely survived being deep-sixed by the Massachusetts House.

If this isn’t bad enough, Bristol County’s Democratic House Representatives are among the worst of the Democratic Party’s morally-flexible do-nothings.

Thanks to Progressive Mass we can view the results of the December 2nd vote on the Police Accountability bill, S.2693, which now awaits Governor Baker’s signature. Of 14 representatives from Bristol County, only six voted for Police Accountability — even after Qualified Immunity had been stripped from the bill.

What was so wrong with a POST Commission that professionalizes and certifies police officers? What was so upsetting about giving school superintendents discretion to decide whether they want SROs in their schools instead of letting police chiefs decide? The legislators won’t say — only that they get most of their information from the police.

Below is a table of how Bristol County legislators voted.

Remember their names when they ask for your vote in 2022.

I don’t mean to veer into satire — it’s not really a strength and this is hardly a joking matter. But yesterday, as I was checking out the limitations of a piece of “freemium” software (as opposed to buying the full “Pro” plan), it dawned on me that our “justice” system is exactly like software with the Freemium model.

The justice most Americans receive — unless they are white, well-connected, tasked with keeping the poor and people of color in their place with state-sanctioned violence, or can buy impunity — is the inferior “Lite” version.

The way many viewed the 2020 elections, it was supposed to be a referendum on Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 virus. Instead it turned out to be a referendum on how much Americans care about the lives of their neighbors and children, racial justice, science, and democracy.

Well, we don’t.

That such significant numbers of people voted for white supremacists, QAnon wingnuts, and xenophobes showed that Trump correctly grasped how much Americans worry about criminality, fascism, and corruption in their electeds.

Again, we don’t.

An editorial in last night’s Tageszeitung hit the nail on the head when it pointed out that not only do Americans not care, “they know exactly what they’re doing.” Trump voters knew full well last night that they were burning down the house with everyone in it. And that there would be no survivors.

But this is who we are. Trump didn’t burn down the house. White American did.

Democratic pollsters told us that America needed a steady voice from the “middle.” It turned out their prescriptions were no better than their polling. Pinning all their hopes on Biden’s character and promising a reset to the halcyon days of 2008 backfired on Democrats. in the end Biden’s only strategy was running on Trump’s COVID failures. It wasn’t enough.

After the death of 3,000 people in 911, Americans were ready to invade the world, gut their own Constitutional protections, seal the border, and then bring their foreign wars back to America’s cities. But now, with a quarter of a million deaths directly attributable to Trump’s denials and sabotage, there is barely a peep of outrage from his supporters. The Coronavirus is just the flu and, anyway, Trump’s not responsible, China was. No, America hit an iceberg and we just have to throw women and children overboard and crowd as many billionaires into the lifeboats as we can.

One obvious takeaway from this election is that it was less a referendum on Trump’s corruption and impunity — which Americans obviously admire — than on the Democratic Party’s inability to offer something different. The DNC’s idea of “new” was a 78 year-old with hair plugs and dentures. A piece of meatloaf from the ice box with just a hint of freezer burn.

It may be hours or days until we know who won the election. I don’t share the view that both candidates were equally terrible. Trump is a fascist. If he wins, or the presidency is handed to him by the Supreme Court (for the 3rd time in my life), it will be the final nail in the coffin of our ersatz democracy. If Biden manages to prevail, Lady Democracy will still be on life support, her funeral delayed but relatives encouraged to book quick flights to visit her while she moves in and out of consciousness. Still, it’s the better option.

But the greatest lesson of this election for me was that White American may not vote their interests but we certainly vote for people who look like ourselves. Time after time the white voter looks into the mirror and refuses to see the ageing, racist sociopathic bully on the other side of the glass — yet each time he invariably looks like Donald Trump.

Legislators are elected to help people. Some think their responsibility stops with constituents; others have a broader sense of responsibility to the earth, humanity, and global concerns. This is who I want representing me.

When it comes to immigration issues, I want legislators to take action against the Trump administration’s enlistment of local police in increasingly brazen and cruel roundups of desperate and paperless refugees. But the majority of Bristol County legislators are profound disappointments. Most coast to re-election without challengers. Instead of democracy we have political machinery and patronage in Bristol County. And with a few exceptions, we get hacks instead of leaders as a result.

Hall of Fame

I am grateful to the following state representatives and senators for stepping up to support the Safe Communities Act. It takes guts and principle and that broader sense of responsibility to help suffering human beings, whether they can vote for you or not.

• Rep. Antonio F. D. Cabral, 13th Bristol (H.3573)

• Rep. James K. Hawkins, 2nd Bristol (H.3573)

• Sen. Paul R. Feeney, Bristol and Norfolk (S.1401 is the Senate version)

• Sen. Rebecca L. Rausch, Norfolk, Bristol and Middlesex (S.1401)

Wall of Shame

The Republicans on the list below all belong on the Wall of Shame. Their party has become a rotting husk and a personality cult whose immigration policy is literally written by white supremacists. No surprise that Massachusetts Republicans march in lockstep with White House immigration advisor Stephen Miller, who proposed deporting Central American DACA recipients in railroad boxcars.

But the Democrats on this list? To be charitable, if they don’t share the xenophobia of their Republican friends, then their only excuse is that they are cowardly machine politicians afraid of angering rightwing police unions and some of their more racist constituents. Everyone on the list below will protest that they’re not racists or xenophobes — and a few can even point to programs they’ve funded which help disadvantaged communities.

But when it’s time to show their mettle, they are invariably too timid to help refugees whose lives have been upended by war, climate change, political instability, or hunger. Their love of humanity is conditional and narrow, reserved only for campaign contributors and potential voters. For refugees they look away, and for that — Democrat or Republican — they ought to be deeply ashamed.

• Rep. Jay Barrows

• Rep. Carole Fiola

• Rep. Patricia Haddad

• Rep. Christopher Hendricks

• Rep. Steven Howitt

• Rep. Christopher Markey

• Rep. Shaunna O’Connell

• Rep. Norman Orrall

• Rep. Elizabeth Poirier

• Rep. Paul Schmid

• Rep. Alan Silvia

• Rep. William Straus

• Senator Michael Brady

• Senator Mark Montigny

• Senator Marc Pacheco

• Senator Michael Rodrigues

• Senator Walter Timilty

Sometime after midnight on March 13, 2020 Breonna Taylor was sleeping when plainclothes Louisville narcotics officers, acting on faulty information, executed a “no-knock warrant” — a violation of almost everything in the Fourth Amendment — breaking down her front door with a battering ram and killing her in the hallway of her own home.

According to Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, police were looking for a drug stash owned by Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, who did not live with her and had already been arrested. During the botched raid, Taylor’s current boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, assumed it was a home invasion and fired what he said was a warning shot. Police then unleashed a fusillade of 35 rounds on both occupants of the apartment. Taylor was hit six times and several shots were fired into adjacent apartments, endangering three people. As Breonna Taylor bled out, police stood around watching her die, offering her no aid.

Breonna’s killing has brought some changes to Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) procedures and also resulted in a $12 million wrongful death settlement with the City of Louisville.

But holding police to account was a bridge too far.

A Kentucky grand jury presented Judge Annie O’Connell with its recommendation that none of the three officers who shot Taylor ought to face charges. Although former Det. Brett Hankison was indicted on three charges of wanton endangerment — for shooting up the apartments next door — Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove will not face any charges for killing Taylor.

Police have been less than honest. Although at least one officer, Tony James, was photographed wearing a body camera, and another officer was filmed wearing a bodycam mount on his vest, LMPD at first insisted there was no bodycam footage. Then Todd McMurtry, Sgt. Mattingly’s attorney, miraculously produced bodycam footage of the raid that showed that his client, who was shot in the leg, could not possibly have shot Taylor.

Likewise, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s whitewash makes a mockery of fact and law. Cameron claims that Walker was the only one at the scene who could have shot Mattingly because all the officers were carrying .40 caliber handguns. But Det. Brett Hankison — the one who shot up the neighboring apartments — had a 9 mm weapon. Worse, Cameron turns justice on its head by declaring that the police had a right to defend themselves from Walker — even after breaking in, unannounced, in error, and plainclothed. Whatever Cameron’s tortured rationale, officers were not defending themselves from a little 26 year-old EMT when they fired almost two dozen rounds at her.

Following the release of Cameron’s findings, on September 21st the same police department that killed Breonna Taylor declared a state of emergency, announcing that in anticipation of protests they would be shutting down traffic, limiting parking, and setting up barricades — to protect property.

Breonna Taylor’s killing has left Louisville in turmoil. Hearts are broken and in the absence of justice many windows are going to have to be broken to vent outrage at a system that values property more than human life, and black lives least of all.

Breonna Taylor. Say her name. Honor her name.

If we truly believe in justice in this country, there must also be justice for Breonna Taylor.

After decades of shielding police from prosecution for the murders of Black and Brown people, and four centuries of systemic racism, many Americans have had enough of police impunity.

But state violence is just one symptom of a society founded on white supremacy. The upwelling of protests demanding police reform is not simply about the police. After four years of unprecedented presidential criminality and corruption, the protests are as much about the Trump administration’s impunity as they are about his friends in law enforcement.

Since the George Floyd murder there have been over 100 days of protests. Despite the rare occasions of rioting, almost all have been peaceful. To White America, however, such unrest is a frightening reminder that white supremacy’s days are numbered. Race, like the Coronavirus, is on everyone’s mind.

But having failed to save the lives of what are projected to top 400,000 COVID-19 victims by year’s end, Trump is (again) running on race and avoiding the subject of his incompetence in dealing with a national emergency.

Racialized Law and Order

In June Trump announced “I am your president of law and order.” Forget the pandemic, Trump was saying. What White America should really fear is accountability for both his administration and America’s unfettered Police State. Accordingly, “gun couple” Mark and Patrica McCloskey were invited to address the July GOP convention after they aimed weapons at Black Lives Matter protestors in Saint Louis, Missouri. Other GOP speakers, including Rudi Guilani and Michael McHale, president of the National Association of Police Organizations, painted an apocalyptic image of America under Biden and Harris. Mike Pence comforted the white base: “We will have law and order on the streets of this country.”

But if that appeal to authoritarianism and racism were not sufficiently obvious, after the convention Trump warned supporters that holding police accountable would threaten white suburbia. Having traded in an inaudible dog whistle for a racist bullhorn, Trump went for broke by issuing a September 4th memo banning anti-racism and anti-bias training as “un-American.”

So, if anti-racism is anti-American, what then is “American?”

The Killer of Fifth Avenue

Maya Angelou had it right when she said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” In January 2016 Trump made the now-famous statement: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, ok? It’s, like, incredible.”

And it was incredible. The Killer of Fifth Avenue was letting everyone know that laws and norms — which everyone else is obliged to follow — don’t apply to him or his base.

No one should have been surprised then by the epidemic of corruption and criminality that followed.

Donald Trump is “a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”

These are the words of Trump’s own lawyer, Michael Cohen.

“All he wants to do is appeal to his base. […] He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this. […] His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God. […] The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit. […] It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

Those were the words of Trump’s own sister, Maryanne Trump Barry.

Trump’s astounding collection of criminal associates

The assortment of con men and sociopaths who committed crimes in Trump’s behalf is astounding: Cohen, who pled guilty to tax evasion, lying to a bank, campaign finance violations, and lying to Congress; former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI; ex Trump campaign aide Rick Gates, convicted of “conspiracy against the U.S.” and lying to the FBI; former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, conspiracy against the U.S., tax evasion, bank fraud, hiding bank accounts, and obstruction of justice; former Trump campaign advisor George Papadapolous, lying to the FBI; former Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone, lying to Congress, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering; and most recently, Steve Bannon, Trump campaign manager and White House advisor, arrested and charged with defrauding investors in a border wall crowdfunding scheme.

Pardon me — and my pals

Even if you wave away the Mueller investigation or ignore the astounding collection of criminals Trump has hired and surrounded himself with, then look at his presidential commutations and pardons — beginning with the murderers and war criminals.

War crime and murder

In May 2019 Trump pardoned war criminal Michael Behenna, who had been convicted of committing murder and assault in Iraq. In November 2019 Trump pardoned Mathew L. Golsteyn, convicted of another war crime, a murder in Afghanistan. The same day Trump also pardoned Clint Lorance, convicted of killing two Afghanis and ordering his unit to shoot civilians. And, to highlight that impunity for murder was the basis for his pardons, Trump just slapped economic sanctions on International Criminal Court officials investigating American war crimes.

Civil rights abuses

If war crimes deserve impunity, then why not civil rights abuses too?

Trump’s first Presidential pardon in August 2017 was for Joe Arpaio, convicted not of the many civil rights abuses and racial profiling he committed over decades as Maricopa County Sheriff but ultimately for contempt of court. By pardoning Arpaio Trump was signaling to a white supremacist base that laws don’t apply to them. Senator John McCain noted that Trump’s pardon “undermines his claim for the respect of rule of law “

Treason and sedition

Trump, who was photographed fondling an American flag at a CPAC Convention, and whose faux Christianity seems equally dubious, may play an uber-patriotic Commander-in-Chief on TV, but the evidence suggests he has stronger attachments to cronies who actually undermine national security.

In April 2018 Trump pardoned Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted for “outing” CIA agent Valerie Plame for political purposes, and whose sentence was commuted by George W. Bush. Most recently, Trump pardoned Libby for convictions on obstruction of justice and perjury. Likewise, Trump commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, who was a Trump operative coordinating 2016 Russian election interference and was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice.

Trump may scream “law and order” at the sight of unruly people protesting police murders, but Trump’s actual support for sedition by far-right white people casts the whole “law and order” shtik into question.

In 2012 Dwight Hammond and his son Steven were convicted of arson on federal property. Their sentences were stiffened in 2015, which led to the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon by far-right extremists, including milias and sovereign citizen groups. Trump pardoned the Hammonds in July 2018.

Election fraud and interference

Trump claims that GOP voter suppression and the rejection of absentee ballots is done to protect the sanctity of the voting booth. But it’s clear he has no respect for election integrity.

In May 2108, Trump pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, a Fox News crony, who was convicted of making illegal campaign contributions to a Republican Senate campaign. In May 2019 Trump pardoned Pat Nolan, another Republican, who was convicted of soliciting illegal campaign contributions. And in February 2020 Trump pardoned Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of wire fraud, conspiracy, attempted extortion, perjury — all related to his offer to literally sell the gubernatorial Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama.

Looting and lying

And despite Trump’s staged tour of the site of arson and looting in Kenosha, he doesn’t oppose corporate looting — or individual acts of looting committed by his cronies.

In December 2017 Trump commuted the sentence of Sholom Rubashkin, who ran America’s largest kosher meat-processing plant in Iowa. Rubashkin had been charged with immigration violations, sexual harrassment, and child exploitation, but it was the 86 counts of bank fraud that did him in. Son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed Trump for Rubashkin’s commutation. Another of Trump’s cronies, Conrad Black, former media mogul and author of a glowing biography of Donald Trump, was pardoned (only after the book appeared, of course) in May 2019 for mail fraud and obstruction of justice related to embezzling funds from the newspapers he owned. Edward DeBartolo, Jr., was pardoned in February 202 after being convicted of extortion and a quid-pro-quo involving a casino license. Michael Milken, whose name is virtually synonymous with financial corruption, was pardoned the same day for securities, mail, and tax fraud. To these names add Paul Pogue (tax fraud), disgraced cop Bernard Kerik (tax fraud), Ted Suhl (bribery), and Judith Negron (health care fraud and money laundering).

Two Americas

There are two Americas. One is the idealized America taught in Social Studies and naturalization classes. In this version, government operates like a well-oiled machine, humming along nicely thanks to fail-safe checks and balances. In this America everyone is equal under the law. This fictional America has never really existed. But there’s no reason this “more perfect union” should and could not exist.

But in the twisted kleptocratic oligarchy that does exist, big cats prey upon smaller animals. The only real law is the Law of the Jungle. Power and privilege, and maximizing that power and privilege, strangle democracy. Checks and balances only get in the way. Laws are insults and inconveniences to white men in power. And their power is only sustained by impunity for those who wield power in their name.

We can thank Donald Trump for making it undeniably clear what type of America we really live in — a nation where the President has completely corrupted the legislature, the judiciary, and his own executive office. Where personal loyalty subverts Constitutional accountability. Where presidential crimes go unpunished and where the President’s cronies and bag men literally receive “Get out of Jail” cards. A nation on the brink of fascism, if it hasn’t already arrived.

The 2020 election boils down to a simple choice between the aspirational America most of us want — an imperfect, loud and messy democracy with accountability for public servants — or a police state in bed with a kleptocracy.

This is the simplest and most stark choice any American voter will ever have to make.

These are interesting times. Suddenly many White people are looking at racism and capitalism with much more critical eyes. In a perverse sort of way, COVID-19 has opened avenues for change and given White people an unexpected opportunity to reflect on how our society fails all but a handful of us.

With the economy going down like the Titanic, suddenly many White Americans have noticed who’s being escorted into the First Class lifeboats, and it’s been an eye-opener to see how the whole system is rigged. Overnight, multiple crises have generated a little more understanding and sympathy for people who have been in coach or steerage their whole lives. Sitting at home during an enforced “time-out” White Liberals have had a chance to do some much-needed and long-postponed introspection. Everyone is learning more about the depths of depravity and dysfunction of a system built around White Supremacy.

But there is a certain tendency of White Liberals to start with introspection and stop there. Robert Kuttner, writing in the American Prospect (“Beyond White Navel-Gazing”) gives an example of dutiful but hollow Yom Kippur apologies a few of us offer, where the resolve to change and repair is absent from the apology.

Unless an apology is specific and accompanied by a specific plan to repair the injustice, injury, or insult, most Talmudic scholars don’t regard it as serious. The requirements for Jewish Tshuvah are very similar in the Muslim world. Depending on the offense, repentance often includes restitution or reparations.

Many of the anguished White tears we’ve been seeing lately are empty gestures unless accompanied by work for racial justice. Book groups and discussion groups are important, don’t get me wrong. Most of us have an incredible lack of understanding of structural racism, much of our own history, many of our own laws, and we know surprisingly little about the lives and cultures of a third of our American friends and neighbors. Discussion groups help provide understanding and strengthen resolve to join the fight.

But, above all, White people mostly need to just choose sides. We either choose justice and equality — or we continue, comfortably and complacently, failing to change a system that works better for some of us than others. This country really is going down like the Titanic. And, in a time of crisis, action ought to supersede navel-gazing.

I think of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who described marching in Selma as “praying with his feet.” Though I completely lack any religious impulse, I admire the Jewish Prophetic tradition of challenging unjust kings and laws. Heschel literally wrote a book about it, and he was aware of the connections between the Jewish tradition and the African-American prophetic tradition. But at the end of the day it wasn’t history or scripture or even common cause that motivated Heschel. He was just a White guy who understood that what went on inside his own heart and head was much less important than fixing a broken world.

I woke up strangely optimistic this morning. At times it seems like we are floating in a vast sea, no winds to return us home or to take us to another port. Just stuck, waiting either for rescue or for a change of weather.

This week almost felt like a change of weather.

Yes, our Führer-wannabe is still in the White House, but as a sign of his decreasing power and increasing fear of his own subjects, he turned his executive complex into something resembling the Green Zone, surrounding himself with generals, lackeys, and his own Republican Guard. Orange Saddam even retreated to his bunker (aren’t mixed metaphors great?).

Here in Dartmouth, an overwhelmingly white town, a high school student organized a parade against racism and local businesses donated water to marchers. It was only last year that the Black Lives Matter movement was considered too extreme for most of White America. But now, here the locals were, marching and shouting “Black Lives Matter” and “No justice, no peace” with gusto.

Now, if only they would get rid of the racist Dartmouth school mascot.

Sometimes White America hops on movements in the same spirit as attending a fiesta: many hashtags are consumed and a good time is had by all. Then everybody goes home — to read about it with their support system or their reading group, with the emphasis on personal growth (there’s got to be something in it for me).

Sometimes a hashtag movement gains a bit of traction and actually results in something. Let us hope that the fight against structural racism is more than a passing fad and that proposals for police, criminal justice, and economic reform are daring, sweeping, and radical — in the sense of dealing with the root causes of these problems.

But so far I am seeing White Americans pretty much buying up anti-racism books, scheduling Zoom coffee klatches, and having deep and abstract conversations with one another. There seems to be a lot of discussion about reforming police training — but a lot of push-back against progressive efforts to reduce funding for police departments; wrest control from police unions of discipline, hiring and policy; and using taxpayer money for social services for distressed, police-occupied communities — while “defunding” the police at local, state, and federal levels.

Kaffee klatches for discusting racism are certainly no substitute for working for meaningful reform, but (as one person texted me): “To be charitable, they need to work their feelings out and that is important in its own way.” Ouch.

And as anemic as White America’s response has been, it is still cause for cautious optimism.

But we — fellow white people — we ought to be able to do a hell of a lot better than this.

Like everyone I have been watching events of the last few months with horror. I don’t mean the Corona virus, which most civilized nations, even the hardest-hit, have managed to confront with strength, medical science, and social responsibility — while the United States instead has chosen denial, lies, and finger-pointing.

No, as bad as it is — and it’s not over by a long shot — the world will survive this as it did the 1918 Spanish flu.

It’s our “democracy” — and the word is in quotes because I’m not convinced we actually have one — it’s our democracy’s demise that’s making me lose sleep.

No need to recite the long list of crimes and usurpations from the fascist playbook that the current President has committed in only the last few months. No need to point out the erratic, disturbing behavior on display daily. Encouraging acts violence, threats to the press, the Justice Department run by a gang of cronies defending criminals. All part of a four year nightmare from which we have not yet awakened.

Even the steady approval the President receives from his “base” of White Christian nationalists, anti-government militias, overt white supremacists and treasonous grifters — this, in one form or another, has been with us since the founding of this slave republic. Historians can fill you in on past centuries, but if you don’t know what’s transpired in your own lifetime, you haven’t been paying attention.

I’ve been relatively silent these last months. Truth is, I’ve said just about everything I’ve had to say about Capitalism, American imperialism, foreign policy, militarism, white supremacy, inequality, immigration, press freedom, democracy, criminal justice, and police accountability.

If, after the second collapse of the American economy in little more than a decade — and if, after seeing precisely on what kind of foundation American Capitalism is based, the kind of people running the show, the total disregard they have for the lives of citizens and how easily they will abuse the power of the state for their own advantage — if after all this inescapable reality people cannot recognize America’s true face, then what’s the point of hurling more words into the void?

Hardly surprising, my conservative friends and relatives don’t understand why I have a problem with things that have been working so well for them — for us, for white America — these last 400 years. But it is American Liberals that worry me the most.

Here we are, on the cusp of a national election, and Democrats — correctly identified as the party of upper middle class elites — don’t know what side they’re on. Of the several trillion dollars of COVID-19 bailout money allocated, little is actually finding its way into human hands. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the amount “crumbs” when refusing to support one rescue bill.

Here we are, faced with the loss of 50 million jobs and the Democratic nominee is still clinging to Obamacare — employer-based healthcare — and his party has never debated generational poverty.

Here we are, faced with a resurgence of lynchings and police abuse, viral infection of prisoners in tightly-packed prisons — and Democrats have said almost nothing about mass incarceration and police accountability.

Here we are, faced with the obvious connections between global pandemics and global environmental crises, and the need to address them urgently — and the DNC still thinks environmental policy and the Green New Deal are too controversial to discuss in public.

My Liberal friends expect me to support a gaffe machine who was just pulled out of storage and still smells of mothballs — this after watching younger, better, smarter candidates of color being systematically flicked off the primary chess board.

But of course I’ll vote for him. What’s the alternative? A neurosyphilitic white supremacist? Liberals are not wrong to describe the 45th president as a toxic menace. But he’s only a menace because he has so successfully exploited every loophole in a Constitutional government designed by slaveholders to thwart a functional democracy.

My Liberal friends tell me their man is just the guy America needs to return things to “normal.”

And this is precisely the problem. The “new normal” in America is really just the unavoidably, undeniable cartoon version of the “old normal” Democrats would have us return to. And it does nothing to address underlying problems of economic inequality, racism, militarism, and systemic exploitation and injustice that have made a lot of Democrats financially very comfortable.

Among Democrats there is an obsessive preoccupation with quashing “divisiveness,” a disturbing avoidance of committing to specific policy positions, and an even more disturbing kinship with Republicans — the obsession with “leadership.” Maybe it’s because in a Capitalist society every chief executive is a mini-Stalin, and it’s just another convention we never question. One friend wrote that a detailed party program was wrong, that we should elect Biden and then let him write it: “once elected, then comes the hard work of determining the specifics.”

What my friend describes is a very American, very corporate, fundamentally undemocratic, and frankly patronizing, process of leaving heavy thinking to a leader who doesn’t have to follow party principles. In fact, in this world parties don’t have any principles. By the time political decisions are made lobbyists are already running the show — because they were the ones whispering into the candidate’s ear from the beginning.

A recent example of the Liberal preoccupation with “leadership” is a Washington Post article by Karen Tumulty attempting to connect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 remarks with Robert Kennedy’s after Martin Luther King’s assassination: “Though Kennedy was a white man of enormous privilege, he spoke with the moral authority of one who had lost his own brother to a murderer’s bullet […] Barely two months later, Kennedy himself would be slain. But the words he said still live. They speak not only to what this country can still become, but its need for a leader who can point the way in that direction.”

But nostalgia, name-dropping, and ham-handed metaphors don’t cut it for a lot of Americans. If you hadn’t noticed this week, African Americans are fed up with being killed and fed up with meaningless verbiage.

From Bakari Sellers to Derecka Purnell to Van Jones to Trevor Noah Liberals have had a recent opportunity to hear (again) from black intellectuals and notables in media outlets they are familiar with. And these men and women are not saying anything past generations haven’t told white Liberals. The question is: why haven’t we been listening?

Van Jones took aim at Liberal hypocrisy: “It’s not the racist white person who is in the Ku Klux Klan that we have to worry about. It’s the white, liberal Hillary Clinton supporter walking her dog in Central Park who would tell you right now, ‘Oh I don’t see race, race is no big deal to me, I see all people the same, I give to charities,’ but the minute she sees a black man who she does not respect, or who she has a slight thought against, she weaponized race like she had been trained by the Aryan Nation.”

I guess some of us are just a special sort of stupid. If Trump was promising “shooting” for “looting,” New York City major Bill DeBlasio was shooting himself in the foot. After NYPD police officers actually ran over demonstrators with patrol cars, the mayor defended their actions, attributing unrest in the city to “out-of-towners” — apparently the Northern version of “outside agitators.”

Liberals just don’t know (without running a focus group or consulting pollsters) whose side they’re on.

An article in the Root ridiculed the White need to “contextualize the anger, frustration and desperation that forced protesters to recreate the lawlessness and chaos that black people experience on a daily basis.” “Alright,” it began. “August 1619…”

It is not a single person, a particular president, or a specific “leader” who is the cancer destroying the United States. It is not bad leadership but Capitalism and White Supremacy that are killing people, impoverishing families, oppressing people.

If Liberals think that replacing one old white hair-plugged, dental-veneered geezer with another is the only remedy for what ails us, I have some hydroquinone I’d like to sell you.

The issue is not leadership, but the system that the leader leads.

Each day we are reminded how corrupt, incompetent, mentally ill, and cognitively impaired Donald Trump is. His administration is a nightmare from which we awake only to discover that the new day’s reality has become even more frightening than the day before.

With over 1.2 million COVID-19 cases and over 73,000 deaths [as of today], Trump is more concerned with “reopening” the country than saving lives, providing testing and masks, or issuing a national shutdown order. Trump’s leadership has been as lacking as with every other GOP response to a natural disaster.

Trump has hawked snake oil cures, peddled multiple conspiracy theories involving China and the World Health Organization, his scientists have been muzzled, he has sidelined and censored the CDC, and his son-in-law is in charge of phantom ventilator contracts. Just as with deals involving the mafia, when doing business with the White House Don it seems it pays to “know a guy.”

In the midst of all this chaos, ineptitude and deep division over how (or whether) to socially distance, people have no recourse but to fend for themselves, make their own masks, help their neighbors, try to nurture social connections, and somehow keep body and soul together. Trump’s followers, however, are prepping for the apocalypse, stockpiling weapons and ammunition, placing their neighbors in the crosshairs, and putting them in spitting (and coughing) distance — all because it’s their “right” as God-fearing White Americans.

In Michigan, armed militia members opposing the governor’s stay-at-home orders entered the state capitol, forcing legislators to don kevlar vests. In contrast, the full weight of the State has come down on any Black person found ignoring masks or social distancing orders. That is, when Black folks aren’t being harrassed for actually wearing a face mask. In Texas, a white woman refused to obey an order to close her salon and became a hero in a state that objects to asylum seekers crossing the border because “we are a nation of laws.” But laws only for some.

The Coronavirus has also illuminated America’s festering racial, class, and economic inequalities. For Republicans the pandemic has been a bonanza for extracting greater tax and loan advantages for Big Business, enacting bans on travel and abortion while the public is distracted, and for returning the country to the 1950’s. For Democrats, the economic and health crisis on our doorstep hasn’t fully registered. Democrats managed to choose a 78 year-old Centrist with a massive #MeToo problem who just wants to return the world to 2012 and to tweak Obama’s flawed health plan as little as possible. In the meantime, the world has completely changed. Even with Biden’s candidacy in shambles, they’re still sticking with their man and his vision for the past.

Although people of color and America’s working poor have borne the brunt of the pandemic, there is little indication that help is on the way. Although $3 trillion has been disbursed to save American jobs, most of the money is predictably not finding its way into human hands.

Black Americans account for a staggering number of Coronavirus deaths. In Louisiana, the percentage of African American mortality among all COVID-19 deaths is 70%. The same percentage describes the situation in Chicago. Black Americans have long had high rates of asthma (lack of environmental protections), diabetes and heart problems (lack of healthcare and insurance) — and these are all “underlying conditions” which reduce COVID-19 survivability. It’s no exaggeration to say that America is literally killing Black people.

Despite the fact that the the Navajo Nation has the third highest infection rate in the country, it has not received emergency funds for testing. Similarly, the Seattle Indian Health Board, a Native American health center, “asked for tests, and instead they sent us a box of body bags,” according to the center’s CEO. White America seems to be trying to tell Native Americans something.

LatinX workers in the nation’s meat processing plants have been forced to work-while-sick at their jobs despite massive infection levels. Likewise, people in the jails and prisons of this nation with the greatest incarceration rate in the world — overwhelmingly poor and people of color — are at risk of contracting the virus in crowded, unsanitary conditions, deprived of soap, face masks and testing.

Many Americans are now literally starving, people are unable to pay for rent or food, and everyone wants an expansion of antibody testing and vaccine development. But corporate immunity is about the only immunity the Trump administration and its collaborators in the Senate really care about. Democrats just signed off on the greatest corporate giveaway in American history, and only one House representative protested the “crumbs for our families.”

I am confident that America will survive a global pandemic — just as it did 102 years ago. Whether we end up with a quarter of a million or several million deaths is largely up to the lunatics running the asylum. Some of us will be statistics; others will be survivors. Life will go on.

But it’s the survival of anything resembling a democracy that’s got me worried. Unless a substantial number of Americans have had enough, the world of 2025 will be run by the same Capitalists who have profited the most from a series of corporate bailouts beginning in the Seventies. For all the lofty Liberal expressions of “rethinking America” and “reconsidering” who is actually an essential worker, don’t expect to see any change unless we — collectively — decide that an essential worker ought to be paid at least as much as a supply chain consultant. But please, somebody, tell me how that happens in a Capitalist economy.

We don’t have a democracy now, and we won’t have one in 2025 unless everyone is equal under the law. Without a serious effort to erase long-standing economic and racial injustices and completely restructure criminal justice and policing in America, cops will still be harassing and even lynching Black men in America in 2025, and the jails will still be full of poor people who can’t make bail. Without health care as a right, some of us will live decades longer than others. Without reparations or a plan to lift up generationally disadvantaged communities, many Black and Native and LatinX Americans will still live in a Third World America while White America continues to live in its dreamy version of Pleasantville.

A new society is possible. But I fear White America, comfortable in its privilege, really has no incentive to tinker with what’s been working for them so well all these years.

In late March Donald Trump told the press corps, “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down […] This is not a country that was built for this.” Since then Trump seems to have backpedaled on his notion to open the nation for business on Easter Sunday — presumably to the peals of church bells announcing the resurrection of the nation and his own polling numbers. But in a move calculated to sideline the nation’s infectious disease experts — including some of his own advisors — Trump is back at it again.

You never thought the pit bull was going to let go of your pants leg, did you?

Trump recently announced the formation of an “Opening Our Country Council.” He indicated that neither his son-in-law and daughter nor the Vice President would be involved, and it is still unclear who will actually be on the council, or why it is really necessary. Regardless, Trump claims that he — not state governors — has “total authority” to decide when workers will be forced to return to work — without testing, without masks, and without sufficient ICU beds or ventilators to let them survive the COVID-19 infections they will receive by returning too soon to the germ pool.

Trump may not have a plan for dealing with the Corona virus, but he claims total authority to carry out that plan.

Naturally, the nation’s governors are pushing back. New York governor Andrew Cuomo said that before anyone talks about “opening” the nation for business the first order of business will be testing. Connecticut governor Ned Lamont announced that social distancing would remain in effect until at least May 20th, and New Jersey governor Phil Murphy said that economic recovery depends entirely on public health safety.

As for Trump’s “total authority,” Cuomo told CNN, “The president does not have total authority. We have a constitution, we don’t have a king, we have an elected president.” University of Texas Constitutional Law professor Stephen Vladeck agreed, slamming Trump’s authoritarian move: “Nope. That would be the literal definition of a totalitarian government–which our traditions, our Constitution, and our values all rightly and decisively reject.”

With the nation in the grip of both a deadly pandemic and an incompetent fascist wannabe, the nation’s governors have been left to their own devices.

California governor Gavin Newsom announced that his nation-state of California had no choice but to fend for itself given Trump’s inaction and incompetence. California, together with Oregon and Washington, has formed a regional alliance to plot its own course for economic recovery. The same strategy has been adopted by an alliance of Northeast governors from New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.

When Hong Kong temporarily suspended its lockdown after a few weeks, it experienced a spike in new infections and was forced to lock down citizens again. The same sort of spike occurred in Singapore after it prematurely relaxed social distancing. So we know that keeping people sheltered in place must go on much longer, and we know that only testing will tell us how much of the population has been exposed and how much has recovered.

Fifty million Americans receive Social Security payments and many workers are either salaried or still manage to draw an income. These lucky enough to own their homes and have health insurance have a sense they will probably survive the pandemic. For the most part, this segment of America has enjoyed a healthy life of adequate and nutritious food, clean water and a clean environment, and does not have disproportionately high rates of diabetes, hypertensions or asthma. This privileged segment of America does not live in crowded apartments in polluted neighborhoods for which they must pay rent, is not forced to commute during a pandemic on crowded subways or buses, and can afford to have someone else deliver food and supplies to their homes.

But for the rest of America, life is incredibly precarious — and has always been. African Americans, Latinos, Indigenous people, the working class, the working poor, and the disabled are at elevated risk and are dying in shameful numbers. There is an old saying something like, “When white folks catch a cold, black folks get pneumonia.” By sending America’s most vulnerable back to work without adequate protections, we are sending some to their deaths — all for the sake of corporate greed. And because their lives do not hold particularly great value by policy makers.

As we now contemplate the frightening lack of hospital beds and ventilators — and who must die for lack of one — the rules for triage are revealed as decidedly racist. On April 7th Massachusetts Secretary of Health and Human Services Marylou Sudders released a memo entitled “Crisis Standards of Care Planning Guidance for the COVID-19 Pandemic” which described state guidelines for making decisions about who receives care and who doesn’t during the global pandemic. The memo describes the recommendations of a panel of medical professionals in which those with the lowest scores have the highest priority for treatment. “But among the factors giving patients a higher score, and therefore, a lower priority for medical intervention are health conditions common to black, Latino and Asian people including diabetes, hypertension and obesity.”

Oh, well, they’re just going to die anyway.

Similarly, Alabama’s 2010 triage handbook for ventilator use puts a low premium on the lives of disabled people: “persons with severe mental retardation, advanced dementia or severe traumatic brain injury may be poor candidates for ventilator support.”

We are not so very far away from the world of 1935, when a magazine called “New People” published by the new German “Racial Politics Office” pointed out to subscribers:

“60,000 Reich Marks is the cost to society of caring for those with congenital diseases. Citizens, this is your money.”

Democracy did not die today with the Senate rubber-stamping the President’s “innocent.”

For a democracy to die, it must have first lived. There are many precedents for Trump’s sham impeachment trial which point an accusing finger at a nation that has never believed in the florid promises of democracy found in its own Declaration and Constitution.

Slavery, genocide, and subversion of democratic elections in other countries have been a steady feature of American “democracy.” Creating a society of equals with equal opportunity and equal representation has never been its object, as Jim Crow, voter suppression, mass-incarceration, censorship, and ever-new variations of McCarthyism show.

As central to our sick society as these are, I don’t want to talk about history, colonialism, capitalism, or white supremacy today. We know these are the root causes of so many of our ills. I would rather talk about the blatant impunity and injustice which occur daily in our courts and which have culminated with the rigged Senate trial of Donald John Trump on February 5th, 2020. And though there are four centuries of our history to consider, let me simply point to events that have occured in my own lifetime.

In 1955, Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, when he was lynched and his body discovered three days later in the Tallahatchie River. The identities of his killers and the ringleaders of his lynching were never in doubt. Roy Bryant and J.W. Millam were arrested. But an all-white jury found them not guilty.

In 1963 Medgar Evers was murdered in his driveway by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens Council in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1964 an all-white jury somehow could not reach a verdict. It took thirty years of fighting by Evers’ family, and finally his exhumation for additional evidence, to reopen the case against De La Beckwith.

In 1964 Ku Klux Klan “Kleagle” Edgar Ray Killen participated in the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. When Killen was finally arrested, an all-white jury refused to convict a “preacher.” Twenty years later Killen was again charged with murder, but a mostly-white jury again refused to hold him directly accountable for the murders, instead convicting him on lesser conspiracy charges.

The War in Vietnam slaughtered up to two million Vietnamese and left behind birth defects from Agent Orange and ruined bodies from land mines long after the U.S. beat a hasty exit from Saigon. But it was the My Lai massacre in 1968 that indicted the American justice system that failed to prosecute it and the government officials who covered it up. Hundreds of civilians — the US said 347, the Vietnamese government counted 504 — were raped, bayoneted, and shot execution-style, including children, and left in ditches full of blood. Only one platoon member was ever convicted. William Calley was sentenced to just three years of prison, but Richard Nixon ordered this commuted to house arrest. The matter was quietly closed. We have a long history of impunity for war crimes going back to the nation’s founding.

Tens of thousands of black people were lynched from Reconstruction through Jim Crow, and one would have thought this gruesome chapter of our history was over. But it doesn’t take much to revert to barbarism in this country. A case in point was the lynchings of African Americans immediately following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2019 The Nation and ProPublica reported on a significant number of unsolved homicides of black people in Algiers Point and elsewhere, and of the emergence of white supremacist militias that had organized the killings. After the articles were published, New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley said he’d “look into” it.

Most of us will not forget the name Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who in 2012 was shot after punching George Zimmerman, who had been harrassing and following him. Zimmerman’s lawyers had planned to defend their client on the basis of so-called “stand your ground” laws, and the case was under intense public scrutiny. Alan Dershowitz — that Dershowitz — attacked Florida’s State Attorney Angela Corey for even daring to prosecute Zimmerman. In the end a Florida jury let Zimmerman walk.

In 2013, when rich white boy Ethan Couch crammed seven of his friends into his hot red pickup truck and then totaled it, killing four of them, Couch’s defense lawyer claimed he was a victim of “affluenza” — a word the lawyer said described the coddled teen’s irresponsibility resulting from his family wealth. Even though Couch had a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit and had killed four people, the defense strategy worked. Couch was released on probation — until he fled to Mexico with his mommy.

And who can forget former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who murdered Michael Brown in 2014 and was never prosecuted? This was a case that launched the Black Lives Movement — a fight against precisely the sort of impunity I’ve been enumerating.

Or Stanford swimmer Brock Allen Turner, who in 2015 was discovered by two graduate students in the process of raping a woman behind a fraternity house dumpster. Turner’s lawyer wrote that “he is fundamentally a good young man” and Turner’s father argued it was unfair that he should go to prison for “20 minutes of action” by his rapist child. The Golden Boy was given six months in jail by Judge Aaron Persky.

Or the refusal to prosecute Baltimore police officers for the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, who died an excruciating death in the back of a police van. Not even Obama’s Justice Department found sufficient grounds to charge any of the officers with civil rights violations. In fact, a 2016 national study which examined civil rights violations of 21,000 policemen found that only 3% were ever convicted of crimes against the public.

In 2018 Georgia white supremacist William Christopher Gibbs showed up at an emergency room afraid he had exposed himself to ricin, and he and his car tested positive for the deadly agent. But prosecutors refused to charge Gibbs with domestic terrorism, cititing “technical” reasons they couldn’t charge a white terrorist. To this day, the U.S. government is largely unwilling to admit any danger to society of white supremacists.

Each year roughly one thousand people are shot by police, most of them people of color and many of them unarmed. But 98% of the officers are never charged for murder and police frequently claim “reasonable” fear for their safety as a justification for killing an unarmed civilian. I find it ironic that police can claim “I feared for my life” — and White America believes them — while any refugee seeking asylum because “I feared for my life” is regarded as a liar.

When Brett Kavanaugh appeared before a Senate confirmation committee in 2018, witnesses cited his sexual predation as a teenager as a reason he was unfit for the Supreme Court. Yet the Senate — as it was when Anita Hill had made similar charges about Clarence Thomas — was not disturbed by any of the allegations. Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times, “Boys will be Supreme Court Justices,” and she was right. Rebecca Solnit wrote that the old white men of America simply don’t want to know, and she was also right.

American Justice may be blind — but it is wilfully so. Our entire legal system, from top to bottom, is nothing more than concierge service for rich and powerful, mainly white, men.

And how is a system of impunity possible without pardons?

In 2019 Donald Trump pardoned SEAL commander “Eddie” Gallagher and promoted him. Members of Gallagher’s platoon, SEAL Team 7, claimed he had killed innocent civilians and murdered an unconscious prisoner, then posed for pictures with the corpse. One platoon member who testified said of Gallagher, “The guy is freaking evil.” According to testimony, when the SEALs captured an injured ISIS fighter Gallagher began stabbing him in the neck. Another platoon member turned off his helmet cam right before the fighter died. Besides Gallagher, Trump also pardoned convicted civil rights abuser Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Dinesh D’Souza, who was convicted of federal campaign violations.

We say we are a “nation of laws” — for some — but in an oligarchy, a kleptocracy, or a kakistocracy the usual rules of law don’t apply to men with high-level connections. Whatever we call this system, let’s not call it a “democracy.”

The 2008 financial crisis was another example of the American justice system revealing itself as an agent of impunity for financial criminality. In 2014 — six years after the financial crash — ProPublica and the New York Times reported that the only Wall Street executive to ever be prosecuted as a result of the crisis was Kareem Serageldin. Meanwhile, there are people still serving life sentences for marijuania possession in prisons all over the United States. To add insult to injury, rather than hold Wall Street accountable for its losses, a bipartisan group of rich and powerful men decided to make citizens cough up the almost two trillion dollars necessary to bail them out.

Last week a friend sent me a piece by Andy Borowitz from the New Yorker — “El Chapo outraged that his trial included witnesses.” It was funny at the time. Or would have been if it hadn’t so painfully highlighted the hollowness of the culture of impunity we mistakenly call “democracy.”

So let us not weep. Democracy did not die today. We never had it in the first place.

Today’s issue of the Standard Times featured an article about a New Bedford man, respected in his community, who has been accused of rape and kidnapping.

The Bristol County District Attorney immediately asked for a dangerousness hearing when the defendant was arraigned on Wednesday. Judge Jeffrey Clifford granted the request and ordered the man held without bail.

The defendant’s lawyer is quoted as saying, “After speaking with him, I honestly believe he is innocent. There is evidence that will exonerate him.”

Nevertheless, the man will likely be held in pre-trial detention for at least four months in Sheriff Tom Hodgson’s dismal hellhole of a jail — presumed guilty, unable to freely consult with his lawyer, and having never had his day in court.

Just last week Randy Gioia, deputy chief counsel of the Committee for the Public Counsel Service’s Public Defender Division, wrote a letter in the Standard Times decrying the practice of using dangerousness hearings to routinely deny bail to defendants in Bristol County. “During fiscal years 2017 and 2018, Quinn’s office had 368 dangerousness hearings in New Bedford alone. That’s more than Boston and all of Norfolk County, combined, during that same period of time.”

It is not a coincidence that Bristol County also has the highest rate of pre-trial detention deaths and the highest rate of jail suicides. Bristol County is a blood red stain on the entire state.

If this were not bad enough, DA Quinn has been lobbying for even more draconian dangerousness provisions in a bill Republican Governor Charlie Baker sponsored, H.66, “An Act to protect the Commonwealth from dangerous persons.” Quinn apparently wants even more blood on his hands.

Gioia was critical of New Bedford mayor and former prosecutor Jon Mitchell’s attacks on the judicial practice of granting bail as it was intended under the constitution. Mitchell, speaking more as prosecutor than mayor, told the Standard Times that the practice has “compromised the safety of our city, negated the hard work of our police officers, and undermined the public’s respect for the state judicial system.”

Baloney.

I’m not worried about judges who follow the Eighth Amendment — but I am extremely concerned about those who act as rubber stamps for prosecutors. When judges and prosecutors are too friendly, as they are in Bristol County, injustice and death is the result.

I don’t know enough about the facts of this specific case, neither does Jon Mitchell and — more importantly — neither does a jury of the man’s peers. Until the man is sentenced we are supposed to regard him as innocent. Let’s do that — and not deny him his Eighth Amendment rights.

If Bristol County keeps on denying civil rights to defendants, just itching to play vigilante, and rewarding abusive sheriffs and prosecutors, we just might have to rename the SouthCoast “the Deep South Coast.”

The U.S. Senate consists of 100 senators, 67 of whom must vote to convict Donald Trump in order to remove him from office. Of these, 53 are Republicans, 45 are Democrats, and 2 are independents. One may think that the greatest obstacle to fair proceedings in the Senate is political affiliation.

But like most things in America, it’s going to be about race.

While Republicans have a majority in the Senate, it’s thanks to a Constitution which gives a state like Wyoming with half a million people the same number of senators as California with almost 40 million.

Our nation’s founders not only feared black demographics but modeled the Senate after the British House of Lords. It wasn’t until the 20th Century that a citizen even got to vote for his senator, Until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, senators were appointed by the governor of each state and often the position was inherited. It wasn’t until 1920 until women could vote at all.

By design, then, the U.S. Senate has always been the Yankee version of the House of Lords. By design it was and remains undemocratic, and by design its purpose is to thwart the will of the people’s House of Representatives. It does this a little too well, and thus undermines democracy.

Also by design, the Senate remains an almost exclusively white club. Of the nation’s 100 senators, 91 are white — a statistical anomaly in a country where 76% of the people are white and the percentage has been in steady decline since 1950. There are four Hispanic senators, three Asian senators, and three Black senators. Kamala Harris is of Indian-Jamaican heritage, checking off two boxes.

All of which is to say — this is the lily white jury that’s going to consider Trump’s Articles of Impeachment.

Donald Trump once boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and wouldn’t lose a vote. A Department of Justice memorandum gives him a get-out-of-jail-free card for federal offenses. And the composition of the Senate makes it virtually certain that Trump’s impeachable offenses will result in acquittal.

But American deference to white billionaires is bipartisan.

Even the House’s Articles of Impeachment are watered-down charges consisting only of the president’s most recent attempts to extort Ukraine to intervene in the 2020 presidential election. So far, the charges don’t include anything from the Mueller report, Trump’s numerous emoluments clause violations, lying about illegal payments to porn stars and mistresses, or any of his many obstructions of justice.

As if all this kid glove treatment were not bad enough, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell intends to fast-track the Senate trial down to two weeks — three times shorter than Nixon’s. And for the sake of comparison, in 2016, when South Korea impeached president Park Geun-hye for corruption and influence-peddling, prosecutors charged her with 13 counts remarkably similar to Trump’s, and her trial in South Korea’s Constitutional Court lasted 10 weeks. Gun-hye’s refusal to appear before the court was never an impediment to her conviction.

No, the travesty of justice we are about to witness from an all-white jury in the U.S. Senate is one America has seen many times before:

• In 1955, when Emmett Till was murdered and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River, his killers were acquitted by an all-white jury after one hour of deliberation.
• In 1963, after Medgar Evers was gunned down in Mississippi, two all-white juries acquitted his killers in separate trials.
• In 1998, when 13 white supremacists were charged with attempting to murder a federal judge and FBI agent, they were acquitted by an all-white jury.
• In 2013, George Zimmerman was found not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin by a jury with only one juror of color.
• In 2016, a group of armed sovereign citizens who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge were acquitted by an all-white jury — while on the same day unarmed Native Americans protesting a pipeline on their own land were maced and beaten by police.
• It’s not even possible to list the thousands of times that white police officers have murdered unarmed black men and been acquitted or simply not charged.

As Trump’s impeachment unfolds, Democrats may rightly fume about a partisan Senate subverting justice by speeding through a sham trial with the clear intention of acquitting the white guy president.

But it’s a travesty of justice that’s hardly unique — and it’s nothing new.

Many Americans have become increasingly alarmed by Donald Trump’s white supremacy, his contempt for democratic institutions of courts and Congress, efforts to redefine and disconnect human rights from international norms, and his administration’s recent participation in a conference on white nationalism. While few would go so far as to say that history is repeating itself, the Trump administration sure seems to be hitting a lot of Nazi notes, if not some Lieder. Understanding how and how rapidly things devolved in Germany in 1933 is an important exercise — especially if we want to make sure that “Never Again” means precisely that.

Ethnonationalism had a dark and dismal history in Germany long before precursors of the Hitlerjugend and the SS arose — long before Hitler. As a political movement Nazism had slow and steady growth after the First World War, but it wasn’t until 1932 when the Nazi party won 37.4% of the vote that Hitler came to power. A year later, in 1933, Hitler became Kanzler. That same year Dachau was constructed and was used mainly for political prisoners. Germans of the day might have felt a bit uneasy about concentration camps, but for the moment they were mainly being used on Communists.

Richard E. Frankel, Associate Professor of Modern German History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, notes that, just as Trump did recently, Hitler pardoned war criminals. “In August of 1932, in the town of Potempa, nine Nazi Stormtroopers murdered a supporter of the German Communist Party, kicking him to death in his own apartment as his family watched in horror. Six were convicted with five receiving the death penalty. After the verdict, Hitler sent them a telegram in which he declared to them his ‘boundless loyalty.’ Shortly after he came to power in 1933, he pardoned the killers.” This was just the beginning of many such pardons. Hitler’s telegram should have been a signal to Germans of Hitler’s contempt of democratic norms, just as pardoning Joe Arpaio should have warned Americans about what Trump would do later.

1933 was a particularly ominous year in Germany. As Kanzler, Hitler declared that German foreign policy demanded the expansion of its territory. Germany First. The staged Reichstag fire and the Ermächtigungsgesetz (“Enabling Act”) consolidated Hitler’s power and Congress — I’m sorry, I meant the Reichstag— soon ceased to have any real political power. The Kanzler was now a Führer and his party had transformed into a cult of personality in which the leader’s wishes superseded any law. Political parties other than the Nazi party were soon illegal, trade unions were banned, and the first book burnings took place that year. Echoing themes we see today, Nazi Germany withdrew from the League of Nations. Germany was above international norms. To make Germany great again, it literally had to beüber Alles.

Within short order there were more mass-pardons, and the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (“Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service”) purged the civil service of Jews. It was called a “restoration” for reasons MAGA America would love — the Civil Service had to be made great, and completely Christian, again. The military was also strengthened, universal conscription ordered, and by 1935 the first Race Laws were enacted. The Trump administration’s threats to override the Fourteenth Amendment — by decree — would confer citizenship by race and not birthplace.

In 1938 mobs organized by the Nazis carried out Kristallnacht — a night of terrorization of German Jews — and the victims were actually charged with the offense. The pretext for Kristallnacht was the assassination of Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath by a 17-year-old German Jew in Paris who had been expelled from the country. German Jews were then collectively punished with a Judenvermögensabgabe, a fine of one billion Reichsmarks for vom Rath’s killing. In today’s dollars this was $5.5 billion, to be satisfied by the expropriation of 20% of all Jewish property in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. The Nazis were just getting warmed up.

Despite the human rights abuses that had been occurring for over a decade (1929-1939), it was only when Germany invaded Poland that Britain and France declared war. In 1940 Denmark and Norway were occupied by Nazi Germany, followed by the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Germany developed plans for blitz-bombing Britain. In 1941 Yugoslavia and Greece were occupied. Germany advanced on Stalingrad. In 1941 Nazi Einsatzgruppen were already coordinating the wholesale slaughter of Jews in European towns and cities where no concentration camps existed. Finally, after Pearl Harbor, in 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States. In 1942 the Wannsee Conference approved plans for the mass extermination of Jews, but the slaughter had been going on for years.

Germany was regarded by many Americans as a model of power and technological superiority. And a number of American industrialists supported Nazism. Fred Koch, the grandfather of today’s Koch Brothers, and his company, Winkler-Koch Engineering, provided the Nazis with oil refining technology. George Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush did business with the Third Reich until 1942, when some of his assets were seized under the 1942 Trading with the Enemy Act. Ford, Coca-Cola, Kodak, GE, IBM, Standard Oil, and even Random House all did business with Hitler. In 1939 there was a massive pro-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden which demonstrated that many Americans regarded Nazi values as American values.

Today, while we are not necessarily on the same path to Nazism as Germany was in 1933, there are many lessons we should learn from the history.

Owing to Germany’s massive militarization, it presented an almost unstoppable threat to the rest of the world. By making adulation of the Führer an explicit operating principle, democracy was easily subverted by spineless politicians who prized power over democracy. By explicitly demonizing a minority, and through the codification of racist laws, democracy was further poisoned. A nation that relied on propaganda, repression and brutality was overwhelmed in every other aspect of civilization except for industrial production — which, like ours, included slave labor. Under Nazism Germany had a Constitution and ostensibly operated under rule of law. But the entire system was cruel and immoral. Today Germans admire dissidents like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The current Kanzler just celebrated the 75th anniversary of an attempt to assassinate Hitler. It is said that history is written by the victors. Apparently so is morality.

Finally, one cannot underestimate the psychology and manipulations of a leader on a receptive public, especially when properly conditioned by state propaganda. Hitler was a man who admired other dictators, notably Benito Mussolini who preceded him in authoritarian rule by more than a decade. Besides Hitler’s popular rallies, one of which was immortalized by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will, Hitler had enthusiastic help from a xenophobic mass media. Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmerwas the FOX News and Sinclair Media of the day.

Though there had been warning signs for years, in an eight year period from 1933 to 1941 one of the most “civilized” nations on earth completely lost its collective mind, becoming a nation of war criminals and mass murderers. Today, in MAGA America, the haters are not singing precisely the same Nazi Lieder — but they sure are hitting a lot of the same notes.

For White America, the accounting of history is all assets and no liabilities. Iowa’s Steve King never stops saying that the profits on America’s balance sheet all belong to white people because, over hundreds of years, it was white people who tamed a brown continent and brought “civilization” to it. Ask White America about Confederate history and you will hear that the Lost Cause is a crucial part of American history and American identity. To take down rebel monuments is to strike assets off White America’s ledgers.

The Western Canon, still taught in some universities, is a sort of Western/white supremacist version of world history and culture. It originally consisted of almost exclusively Greek, Roman, and Christian sources. Ask a white Evangelical Christian, who now only grudgingly acknowledges the “Judeo” part of our newly-reformulated “Judeo-Christian” culture, and you’ll hear that the biblical kingdoms of “Samaria” and “Judea” should be reserved for overwhelmingly European settlers under Israel’s Law of Return, and that Palestinians should remain under perpetual occupation. There’s a thick thread of racism running through all of Western history and culture.

But when it comes to reparations for slavery, White America has a completely different accounting scheme — a scheme in which all debts are automatically cancelled. In this scheme, since all contributions by non-whites are negligible, and their presence so unwanted, their claims on American history are nothing but petty annoyances. If someone wronged you, your parents, your grandparents — even every generation of your ancestors — well, too bad, it’s not our fault. Get over it. No debts were incurred. And no debts need be paid after such a long time.

For a people who don’t believe in a free lunch — not even for poor children — it is curious that White Americans so resolutely refuse to pay their debts. And as a nation we have some pretty big ones — colonialism, genocide, territorial expropriation, slavery, and centuries of racism. In the history of American Capitalism, it was slavery that set the Confederate economy in motion. And it was slavery that underpinned the cotton trade upon which the Northern textile industries were based. Thus, even New England cities — under Northern Capitalism — became rich from slavery. Today White America, South and North, wring their hands over the complexity of the accounting. But regardless of the unwillingness of the debtor to pay the debt, the interest on our Original Sin just keeps accruing.

In the orthodox [White] re-telling of American history, Our good fortune simply fell off a truck. We were lucky enough, and smart enough, to simply scoop it up for ourselves. The triumphalist says: I got mine; the hell with the rest of you. Yet, whether by lying to ourselves about our history or by the sociopathic glorification of it, White America knows full well what it has stolen. And for those who recognize the stolen merchandise as theirs, they know what crimes were committed and that payment is due. That payment must consist of not only a monetary value but a moral accounting.

As much as Republicans and Centrist Democrats would like race to simply go away, a national discussion about reparations — like racism itself — is long overdue. It is not surprising that we are hearing about reparations in the 2020 presidential campaign from both candidates of color and several white Democrats. Ta-Nihisi Coates recently penned a long “Case for Reparations” in the Atlantic, and in it he makes the case, mentioning H.R.40, a bill sponsored in the last legislative session by Michigan Democrat John Conyers, Jr., “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act.”

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Like a Truth and Reconciliation process, a reparations commission would require White America to come to grips with our real history. The questions are complex, the solutions even more so. How do we make amends for crimes committed by past generations that are repeated and still resonate today? Who would all the recipients of reparations be, and what forms would reparations consist of? Following the implementation of reparations, how could we determine if they were lifting up those who needed them the most?

But Coates sums up a reparations commission’s greatest good: “No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as — if not more than — the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.”

Our fragile democracy cannot survive the shameful present reality of the two Americas the Kerner Commission predicted over fifty years ago. Apologies are due, and debts must be acknowledged and paid. Those who have suffered the most must be lifted up and made whole.

This nation must be made whole.

Today is not a day for tanks and flyovers and a would-be Caesar’s notion of American greatness. A nation in crisis cannot honestly celebrate its hollow promises of democracy when they actually pertain to so few, and when more of them disappear with every passing day. Rather than the hollow rhetoric of the nation’s founders, today is a day to listen to the words of someone who actually fought for independence but never fully received it.

On the day after Independence Day 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered the following speech in Rochester, New York. It is a fiery reproach of American independence — “your 4th of July” not “ours” — demanding that White America keep its unfulfilled promises. A century and a half later Douglass’s words still resonate, but White America’s only answer to them, so far, is tanks in the streets and concentration camps.

Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens:

He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept over me quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. I know that apologies of this sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered. Should I seem at ease, my appearance would much misrepresent me. The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings, in country school houses, avails me nothing on the present occasion.

The papers and placards say that I am to deliver a Fourth of July Oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for me. It is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gauge I think I have of Corinthian Hall seems to free me from embarrassment.

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable-and the difficulties to he overcome in getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence I will proceed to lay them before you.

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the Fourth of July. It is the birth day of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, as what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. l am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young.-Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.

Fellow-citizens, I shall not presume to dwell at length on the associations that cluster about this day. The simple story of it is, that, 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of your “sovereign people” (in which you now glory) was not then born. You were under the British Crown. Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government; and England as the fatherland. This home government, you know, although a considerable distance from your home, did, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, impose upon its colonial children, such restraints, burdens and limitations, as, in its mature judgment, it deemed wise, right and proper.

But your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would certainly prove nothing as to what part I might have taken had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when, to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. But, to proceed.

Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated, by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable. This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. Yet they persevered. They were not the men to look back.

As the sheet anchor takes a firmer hold, when the ship is tossed by the storm, so did the cause of your fathers grow stronger as it breasted the chilling blasts of kingly displeasure. The greatest and best of British statesmen admitted its justice, and the loftiest eloquence of the British Senate came to its support. But, with that blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea, the British Government persisted in the exactions complained of.

The madness of this course, we believe, is admitted now, even by England; but we fear the lesson is wholly lost on our present rulers.

Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so than we, at this distance of time, regard it. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it.

Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change (no matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by it), may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor.

These people were called Tories in the days of your fathers; and the appellation, probably, conveyed the same idea that is meant by a more modern, though a somewhat less euphonious term, which we often find in our papers, applied to some of our old politicians.

Their opposition to the then dangerous thought was earnest and powerful; but, amid all their terror and affrighted vociferations against it, the alarming and revolutionary idea moved on, and the country with it.

On the 2nd of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day, whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it.

“Resolved, That these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, dissolved.”

Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, there fore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history-the very ringbolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.

Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ringbolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day-cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.

The coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interesting event. But, besides general considerations, there were peculiar circumstances which make the advent of this republic an event of special attractiveness. The whole scene, as I look back to it, was simple, dignified and sublime. The population of the country, at the time, stood at the insignificant number of three millions. The country was poor in the munitions of war. The population was weak and scattered, and the country a wilderness unsubdued. There were then no means of concert and combination, such as exist now. Neither steam nor lightning had then been reduced to order and discipline. From the Potomac to the Delaware was a journey of many days. Under these, and innumerable other disadvantages, your fathers declared for liberty and independence and triumphed.

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too-great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.

They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.

They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final”; not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times.

How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements! How unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defence. Mark them! Fully appreciating the hardships to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep, the corner-stone of the national super-structure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you.

Of this fundamental work, this day is the anniversary. Our eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. Banners and pennants wave exultingly on the breeze. The din of business, too, is hushed. Even mammon seems to have quitted his grasp on this day. The ear-piercing fife and the stirring drum unite their accents with the ascending peal of a thousand church bells. Prayers are made, hymns are sung, and sermons are preached in honor of this day; while the quick martial tramp of a great and multitudinous nation, echoed back by all the hills, valleys and mountains of a vast continent, bespeak the occasion one of thrilling and universal interest-nation’s jubilee.

Friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do. You could instruct me in regard to them. That is a branch of knowledge in which you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker. The causes which led to the separation of the colonies from the British crown have never lacked for a tongue. They have all been taught in your common schools, narrated at your firesides, un folded from your pulpits, and thundered from your legislative halls, and are as familiar to you as household words. They form the staple of your national po etry and eloquence.

I remember, also, that, as a people, Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait-perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans and can be had cheap! will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans if I say I think the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands.

I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!

My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and His cause is the ever-living now.

Trust no future, however pleasant, Let the dead past bury its dead; Act, act in the living present, Heart within, and God overhead.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have “Abraham to our father,” when they had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit. That people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham’s great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country to-day? Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchers of the righteous? Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men shout-“We have Washington to our father.”-Alas! that it should be so; yet it is.

The evil, that men do, lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones.

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.-The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fa thers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, “It is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less; would you persuade more, and rebuke less; your cause would be much more likely to succeed.” But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They ac knowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may con sent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding.-There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Take the American slave-trade, which we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. Ex-Senator Benton tells us that the price of men was never higher than now. He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in no danger. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year by dealers in this horrid traffic. In several states this trade is a chief source of wealth. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) “the internal slave-trade.” It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. That trade has long since been denounced by this government as piracy. It has been denounced with burning words from the high places of the nation as an execrable traffic. To arrest it, to put an end to it, this nation keeps a squadron, at immense cost, on the coast of Africa. Everywhere, in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave-trade as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the Jaws of God and of man. The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is admitted even by our doctors of divinity. In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish them selves on the western coast of Africa! It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans upon all those engaged in the foreign slave-trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass with out condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and American religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh jobbers, armed with pistol, whip, and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-curdling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the centre of your soul The crack you heard was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow this drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shock ing gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me, citizens, where, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.

I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. There was, at that time, a grand slave mart kept at the head of Pratt Street, by Austin Woldfolk. His agents were sent into every town and county in Maryland, announcing their arrival, through the papers, and on flaming “hand-bills,” headed cash for Negroes. These men were generally well dressed men, and very captivating in their manners; ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. The fate of many a slave has depended upon the turn of a single card; and many a child has been snatched from the arms of its mother by bargains arranged in a state of brutal drunkenness.

The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them, chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. When a sufficient number has been collected here, a ship is chartered for the purpose of conveying the forlorn crew to Mobile, or to New Orleans. From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the antislavery agitation, a certain caution is observed.

In the deep, still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead, heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains and the heart-rending cries. I was glad to find one who sympathized with me in my horror.

Fellow-citizens, this murderous traffic is, to-day, in active operation in this boasted republic. In the solitude of my spirit I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity on the way to the slave-markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep, and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul sickens at the sight.

Is this the land your Fathers loved, The freedom which they toiled to win? Is this the earth whereon they moved? Are these the graves they slumber in?

But a still more inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous state of things remains to be presented. By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason and Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women and children, as slaves, remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the star-spangled banner, and American Christianity. Where these go, may also go the merciless slave-hunter. Where these are, man is not sacred. He is a bird for the sportsman’s gun. By that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril. Your broad republican domain is hunting ground for men. Not for thieves and robbers, enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime. Your law-makers have commanded all good citizens to engage in this hellish sport. Your President, your Secretary of State, your lords, nobles, and ecclesiastics enforce, as a duty you owe to your free and glorious country, and to your God, that you do this accursed thing. Not fewer than forty Americans have, within the past two years, been hunted down and, without a moment’s warning, hurried away in chains, and consigned to slavery and excruciating torture. Some of these have had wives and children, dependent on them for bread; but of this, no account was made. The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! For black men there is neither law nor justice, humanity nor religion. The Fugitive Slave Law makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world that in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America the seats of justice are filled with judges who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding the case of a man’s liberty, to hear only his accusers!

In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenceless, and in diabolical intent this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. I doubt if there be another nation on the globe having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book. If any man in this assembly thinks differently from me in this matter, and feels able to disprove my statements, I will gladly confront him at any suitable time and place he may select.

I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were nor stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.

At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. Did this law concern the “mint, anise, and cummin”-abridge the right to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament, or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the thunder of a thousand pulpits. A general shout would go up from the church demanding repeal, repeal, instant repeal!-And it would go hard with that politician who presumed to so licit the votes of the people without inscribing this motto on his banner. Further, if this demand were not complied with, another Scotland would be added to the history of religious liberty, and the stern old covenanters would be thrown into the shade. A John Knox would be seen at every church door and heard from every pulpit, and Fillmore would have no more quarter than was shown by Knox to the beautiful, but treacherous, Queen Mary of Scotland. The fact that the church of our country (with fractional exceptions) does not esteem “the Fugitive Slave Law” as a declaration of war against religious liberty, im plies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love, and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such persons as “scribes, pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.”

But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines, who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty and leave the throne of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and with out hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation-a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons, and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea’ when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in its connection with its ability to abolish slavery.

The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday School, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery, and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds, and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.

In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared-men honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning. The Lords of Buffalo, the Springs of New York, the Lathrops of Auburn, the Coxes and Spencers of Brooklyn, the Gannets and Sharps of Boston, the Deweys of Washington, and other great religious lights of the land have, in utter denial of the authority of Him by whom they professed to be called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example of the Hebrews, and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God.

My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the “standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ,” is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are. Noble men may be found, scattered all over these Northern States, of whom Henry Ward Beecher, of Brooklyn; Samuel J. May, of Syracuse; and my esteemed friend (Rev. R. R. Raymond) on the platform, are shining examples; and let me say further, that, upon these men lies the duty to inspire our ranks with high religious faith and zeal, and to cheer us on in the great mission of the slave’s redemption from his chains.

One is struck with the difference between the attitude of the American church towards the anti-slavery movement, and that occupied by the churches in Eng land towards a similar movement in that country. There, the church, true to its mission of ameliorating, elevating and improving the condition of mankind, came forward promptly, bound up the wounds of the West Indian slave, and re stored him to his liberty. There, the question of emancipation was a high religious question. It was demanded in the name of humanity, and according to the law of the living God. The Sharps, the Clarksons, the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, the Burchells, and the Knibbs were alike famous for their piety and for their philanthropy. The anti-slavery movement there was not an anti-church movement, for the reason that the church took its full share in prosecuting that movement: and the anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable instead of a hostile position towards that movement.

Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from oppression in your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education; yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation-a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen, and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against the oppressor; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a three-penny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe “that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,” and hath commanded all men, everywhere, to love one another; yet you notoriously hate (and glory in your hatred) all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare before the world, and are understood by the world to declare that you “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain in alienable rights; and that among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.

Fellow-citizens, I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad: it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. it fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement; the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet you cling to it as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!

But it is answered in reply to all this, that precisely what I have now denounced is, in fact, guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States; that, the right to hold, and to hunt slaves is a part of that Constitution framed by the illustrious Fathers of this Republic.

Then, I dare to affirm, notwithstanding all I have said before, your fathers stooped, basely stooped

To palter with us in a double sense: And keep the word of promise to the ear, But break it to the heart.

And instead of being the honest men I have before declared them to be, they were the veriest impostors that ever practised on mankind. This is the inevitable conclusion, and from it there is no escape; but I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. There is not time now to argue the constitutional question at length; nor have I the ability to discuss it as it ought to be discussed. The subject has been handled with masterly power by Lysander Spooner, Esq. by William Goodell, by Samuel E. Sewall, Esq., and last, though not least, by Gerrit Smith, Esq. These gentlemen have, as I think, fully and clearly vindicated the Constitution from any design to support slavery for an hour.

Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gate way? or is it in the temple? it is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slaveholding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can any where be found in it. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a tract of land, in which no mention of land was made? Now, there are certain rules of interpretation for the proper understanding of all legal instruments. These rules are well established. They are plain, commonsense rules, such as you and I, and all of us, can understand and apply, without having passed years in the study of law. I scout the idea that the question of the constitutionality, or unconstitutionality of slavery, is not a question for the people. I hold that every American citizen has a right to form an opinion of the constitution, and to propagate that opinion, and to use all honorable means to make his opinion the prevailing one. Without this right, the liberty of an American citizen would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman. Ex-Vice-President Dallas tells us that the constitution is an object to which no American mind can be too attentive, and no American heart too devoted. He further says, the Constitution, in its words, is plain and intelligible, and is meant for the home-bred, unsophisticated understandings of our fellow-citizens. Senator Berrien tells us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others. The charter of our liberties, which every citizen has a personal interest in understanding thoroughly. The testimony of Senator Breese, Lewis Cass, and many others that might be named, who are everywhere esteemed as sound lawyers, so regard the constitution. I take it, therefore, that it is not presumption in a private citizen to form an opinion of that instrument.

Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand, it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.

I have detained my audience entirely too long already. At some future period I will gladly avail myself of an opportunity to give this subject a full and fair discussion.

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.

“The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from “the Declaration of Independence,” the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated.-Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.

The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God.” In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:

God speed the year of jubilee The wide world o’er! When from their galling chains set free, Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,

And wear the yoke of tyranny Like brutes no more. That year will come, and freedom’s reign. To man his plundered rights again Restore.

God speed the day when human blood Shall cease to flow! In every clime be understood, The claims of human brotherhood, And each return for evil, good, Not blow for blow;

That day will come all feuds to end, And change into a faithful friend Each foe.

With conditions for ICE prisoners deteriorating by the minute, Conservatives lost their minds when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called ICE’s facilities for caging children as young as 4 months of age by their proper name — concentration camps. “I don’t use those words lightly. I don’t use those words to just throw bombs. I use that word because that is what an administration that creates concentration camps is,” she said. “A presidency that creates concentration camps is fascist, and it’s very difficult to say that.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks followed an announcement that ICE now has plans to use Fort Sill, a former Japanese “internment” camp in Oklahoma, to “detain” migrant children. ICE operates 168 camps in 23 states for migrant children alone. According to the Densho Encyclopedia which documents this shameful chapter of American history, Fort Sill housed Japanese-American prisoners who “sometimes lived in 100-degree weather with no escape from the hot temperatures. Guard towers “were equipped with 30-caliber machine guns, shotguns, and searchlights. […] On May 13, 1942, a mentally ill internee was shot dead by guards who claimed that he was trying to escape.” Even if it now has air-conditioning Fort Sill will still be a concentration camp, not an “internment” or “detention center” for a new batch of non-white prisoners.

Liz Cheney, daughter of war criminal Dick Cheney, tweeted: “Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”

Blue Dog Democrat Rep. Josh Gottheimer, piled on as well. In a press statement, Gottheimer said, “the comparison is cruel and disrespectful to the six million who were murdered in the Holocaust, including members of my own family. Concentration camps were places where Jews and others were enslaved, tortured, and then sent to gas chambers to be murdered.”

But not so fast. Sure, Republicans and their weak-kneed Democratic allies get a bit peeved when critics of immigration policy point to how many of Trump’s policies had precedents in the Third Reich. A convenient dismissal is that it “disrespects” Holocaust survivors. But the critics have a point — particularly when a neo-fascist, advised and adored by white supremacists, could so easily and quickly convert detention camps into death camps. It’s happened before.

The Jewish Virtual Library notes that the Nazis operated as many as 15,000 collection, labor, and transit camps, collection points, and ghettos. Of these only a fraction were extermination (or death) camps. Even Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died, was not technically an extermination camp — the Nazis called it a “displaced persons camp” — although its prisoners were housed in unspeakable conditions which led to tens of thousands of deaths. And Theresienstadt — where Nazi propagandists portrayed prisoners as practically on vacation — this too was a concentration camp.

Consider, too, the definition found in the Encyclopedia Brittanica: “concentration camp: internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment, usually by executive decree or military order.” This definition fits precisely the hundreds of thousands of prisoners Trump, by “executive decree,” has placed in American concentration camps — just as the definition applies to the 1.5 million Uighurs in Chinese concentration camps or an unknown number of gay men in Chechen concentration camps.

A world in which facts are disputed and words no longer have any meaning is a dangerous, Orwellian nightmare. Language is important. If the use of “concentration camp” induces a collective meltdown from Trump defenders, then the use of euphemisms like “intern” and “detention” should as well. Guatemalan and Honduran child “interns” are not writing Python code for Google or collecting business contacts at hedge funds. No mentally competent person would say they have been “detained,” as in bad traffic or by a last-minute telephone call.

Let’s stop lying to ourselves. These children are prisoners in a rapidly-expanding network of cruelly-administered American concentration camps.

Last week Margaret Kimberley, writing in Black Agenda Report, called out colonialism, the American police and carceral state, and militarism for what it all has in common — a license to kill people of color. Kimberley also sat down with KPFA to discuss her piece. I was taken with the scope and brevity of Kimberley’s piece, reprinted with her kind permission.

by Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report

Zionism, manifest destiny, wars on terror, humanitarian interventions, and the Monroe and other doctrines always boil down to a license to kill.

Discussions about white supremacy should amount to more than kumbaya moments of interpersonal harmony or hand wringing when lone gunmen go on the periodic racist rampage. Self-identified white people have always posed dangers to every other group. Most of them living today haven’t carried out murder with their own hands but that does not mean that they or their countrymen and women can’t be held to account.

Donald Trump’s presidency complicates this discussion. The threats presented by his appeals to racists cannot be overstated. There is no dispute about his impact. Shortly after he was inaugurated a white supremacist shot and killed six people at a Montreal, Quebec mosque. The killer of 50 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand referred to Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”

But Trump isn’t the only white supremacist leader. White supremacy is the guiding force behind many atrocities committed around the world. Zionism is an example of white supremacy in action. But many of those who expressed shock after the New Zealand killings don’t question Israel’s apartheid system that could not be carried out absent the support of the United States and its allies.

White supremacy explains the willingness of many Americans to support the bipartisan project to carry out regime change in Venezuela and other nations. It is expressed as as positive, a humanitarian gesture meant to save the colored peoples of the world from themselves. The notion of a white man’s burden still exists in the 21st century.

The individuals who carry out these acts usually elicit greater scorn than the presidents and prime ministers who do the same thing. A televised speech claiming that a war is “humanitarian” gets support from the corporate media, conservatives, and liberals too. The unanimity of opinion is based on all the precepts that say white makes right. Zionism, manifest destiny, wars on terror, humanitarian interventions, and the Monroe and other doctrines always boil down to a license to kill. The victims are usually people from the global south and there is little objection when the perpetrator is the state itself.

The Australian killer who flashed the white power gang sign even as he appeared in court should not be seen as the only face of racism. Pointing fingers at him and others of his ilk lets too many people off the hook of responsibility.

His homeland of Australia is the embodiment of the ethno-nationalism that the shooter referred to in his manifesto. Europeans invaded Australia and nearly eradicated the aboriginal inhabitants. The entire indigenous population of Tasmania was wiped out by the settler population. The bigger shock is that there aren’t more mass killers from Australia and other nations that owe their existence to genocide.

The mosque killer regards the non-white immigrant as an invader when he is the one descended from the invading people. Candle light vigils may expiate guilt and bring momentary relief but they are a poor substitute for telling the truth about genocides carried out by European descended people around the world.

That is the white supremacy which must be always be discussed. That evil decimated the Iroquois and Lakota and Maori and Tasmanians and maintained a 300-year long slave trade. In a perverse twist the descendants of the genocidaires see themselves as the victims. Whenever a tipping point of color is surpassed the racists react with segregation, gentrification and outright murder.

This point may be the hardest to discuss. Trump is president precisely because he expressed the belief that this colonial settler state is for white people and they should do all they can to keep others out or under their control.

It is easy to express dismay when racist killers attack churches in Charleston, South Carolina or mosques in Quebec or New Zealand. It is harder for self-identified whites who think themselves enlightened to ponder difficult questions about wars and mass incarceration that are carried out in their names.

The maniac killers who use their own firearms are a symptom of a much bigger problem. White supremacy is normalized so much that is becomes like background music. It is ever present and subliminal.

The British tabloid newspaper Daily Mirror had a front page photo of the New Zealand killer as a toddler. The headline read, “Angelic boy who grew into evil, far right mass killer.” Angelic is an apt description for most small children. Every terrorist was once an angelic tot. But only the white ones are given humanity even after they kill. There should be no surprise when racism pushes the unhinged over the edge. They are given legitimacy long before they pick up a gun.

— Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report

Note from David —

After the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, Liberal talking heads and mainstream editorial pages pushed a message that violent White Supremacy and Christian Identity were aberrations set in motion by America’s racist president. Liberals walked back a previous characterization of American Main Street racists as “Deplorables,” casting them instead as innocents struggling with economic anxieties — nothing like the Lone Wolves who carry out mass murders. White Liberals could breathe a sigh of relief — we ourselves could not possibly be culpable.

But when a Muslim Congresswoman had the temerity to express criticism of Israel’s Apartheid-flavored “democracy”– one that killed more unarmed Palestinian demonstrators again this week — and questioned the role of AIPAC and the duplicity of politicians doing a better of job of representing Israel than their own country — the GOP and centrist Democrats attacked her. Yet the very first piece of legislation considered by the Senate, Bill S.1, includes what is in essence a loyalty oath to Israel and violates the First Amendment rights of Americans to boycott. After much waffling, House and Senate Democrats only half-heartedly defended fellow Democrat Ilhan Omar. Apparently crushing bipartisan economic sanctions on Venezuela and Iran are acceptable, while a consumer boycott of Israel must be regarded as nothing but anti-Semitism.

The current war on Venezuela is likewise part of the American imperial enterprise — one that began long ago, and was codified in the Monroe Doctrine. If you believe American aggression happens only under GOP administrations, review the history.

Finally, long before Trump was elected I noticed that mainstream Conservative publications are, in theme and message, virtually indistinguishable from those which directly call for genocide, race war, and ethnic cleansing. The spelling in mainstream Conservative publications may be better and the violent rhetoric may have been replaced with coded messaging, but the message is still the same. Since FOX is the #1 news channel in America, this is apparently what White American likes to hear, what it believes.

It ought to be pretty clear that all this is a white people problem — a problem created by the demographic that wrote our laws and is determined to preserve its political and economic advantages at all cost. And this is a mess we white people are responsible for cleaning up. It is nothing but hypocrisy to claim we support human and civil rights while actually supporting colonial invasions, occupations and repressive “law and order” measures that include police killings and mass incarceration.

Last August Democratic District Attorney Thomas Quinn penned an editorial in the Boston Globe supporting “get tough” bail revocation. It was part of a coordinated effort with Republican Governor Charles Baker to modify the Commonwealth’s Section 58A “Dangerousness” statutes. On September 10, 2018 the governor introduced legislation to keep people not yet convicted of any crime behind bars for up to a year without trial if deemed “dangerous” by police or District Attorneys. And this year, again, Baker’s bill H.66 currently awaits a vote in the legislature.

The governor’s legislation follows several high-profile cases of people out on bail committing serious crimes. In one case, a Weymouth police officer was allegedly killed by a man with a history of run-ins with local police who was out on $500 bail for a pending drug charge. In another case, a Fall River man who was charged in 2015 but never convicted of armed robbery reportedly killed two people, including a veteran and new father, after losing control of his vehicle in a high-speed police chase. The press has been generous with photo-ops of DAs, the governor, and police captains all calling for “Blue Lives Matter” policies. The Sun-Chronicle showed its bias running with “Bristol County DA pleads for bail reform to keep criminals off streets” while NECN cast the legislation as an effort to “Keep Dangerous Criminals Behind Bars.” Forgotten is the fact that you’re only a criminal if you’ve actually been convicted of a crime.

Last Summer the Massachusetts legislature passed an omnibus criminal law reform bill which was signed by the governor and includes bail reform. As Senator Will Brownsberger explained, the reform bill codified the State Judicial Court’s Brangan decision, which ruled that “in setting the amount of bail, whether under G.L. c.276, §57 or §58, a judge must consider a defendant’s financial resources, but is not required to set bail in an amount the defendant can afford if other relevant considerations weigh more heavily than the defendant’s ability to provide the necessary security for his appearance at trial.” The SCJ ruling balanced public safety with concern for America’s habit of criminalizing poverty.

Habitually hostile to civil liberties, Massachusetts district attorneys have destroyed lives, in many cases defending tainted convictions with tainted evidence, and nine out of eleven Massachusetts DAs staunchly opposed the recent criminal justice reform legislation. Nationwide, district attorneys have discovered that running on a “law and order” platform — going after the weakest and most vulnerable in society by labeling them “superpredators” — is always a winning election strategy. So it’s no surprise that both Republican and Democratic DA’s are joining in an assault on Brangan.

Jahmal Brangan, for whom the ruling is named, had been sitting in a Massachusetts jail for three and a half years simply because he couldn’t meet bail. After Brangan’s case was finally heard, now-retired Supreme Judicial Court Judge Geraldine S. Hines wrote, “A bail that is set without any regard to whether a defendant is a pauper or a plutocrat runs the risk of being excessive and unfair.”Hines also added: “A $250 cash bail will have little impact on the well-to-do, for whom it is less than the cost of a night’s stay in a downtown Boston hotel, but it will probably result in detention for a homeless person whose entire earthly belongings can be carried in a cart.”

There is an old truism: “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Indeed, Brangan’s case was just one of almost a million nationwide. On any given day in 2015 roughly 700,000 people were locked up in local jails. The ACLU notes that the bail system disproportionately affects poorer Americans and people of color. Lost in the hysteria over isolated tragedies involving policemen and veterans, the victimization of poor and brown and black people merits barely a statistical footnote.

If you don’t think there’s a racial double-standard in setting bail and letting people participate effectively in their own defense, consider the case of Paul Manafort. When he was first charged with the mountain of offenses Robert Mueller threw at him, Manafort was able to post $10 million bond, allowing him to live, as the Intercept described it, “with a monitoring device around his ankle, in various luxury residences he owns in northern Virginia; Palm Beach, Florida; and the Hamptons, a tony New York beach area.” Even after Manafort’s flight risk became troubling and he was sent to jail, it was nothing like Jahmal Brangan’s experience. New York Magazine reported: “Manafort has everything he needs to prepare for the trial, including his own phone and computer. He is allowed to write emails and make an unlimited number of 15-minute calls to his lawyers. He’s even got his own ‘private, self-contained living unit, which is larger than other inmates’ units,’ the filing says. The unit includes a work space and a private shower. Manafort doesn’t even have to wear a prison jumpsuit.”

District Attorney Quinn, doing the governor’s heavy lifting by misrepresenting the Brangan decision, wrote that “the decision emphasized that judges must consider a defendant’s financial resources when setting cash bail and reiterated that dangerousness was not a reason for setting high cash bail.” Quinn’s (or was it Baker’s) solution is “to hold dangerous criminals without bail after a hearing, REGARDLESS OF THEIR FINANCIAL MEANS. Whether rich or poor, defendants should be held without bail if they are determined to be a danger to the community. The cash bail system can be reserved for defendants who are not dangerous, but still pose a default risk based on their criminal history.”

Denying bail and locking people up for a year completely violates “the principle that there is a presumption of innocence in favor of the accused is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary, and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law.” Commonwealth v. Healy, 15 Mass. App. Ct. 134, 136-137 (1983) citing Coffin v. United States, 156 U.S. 432, 453 (1895); In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 363 (1970); Estelle v. Williams, 425 U.S. 501, 503 (1976); Commonwealth v. Drayton, 386 Mass. 39, 46 (1982).

In 1996, when the Supreme Judicial Court considered whether 58A was constitutional, and whether the government could constitutionally lock someone up without access to bail before they have been found guilty at a trial, one of the prime reasons that the Court allowed this practice was the time limits on 58A, and “that detention under § 58A is temporary and provisional.” Mendonza v. Com., 423 Mass. 771, 790 (1996).

Now DA Quinn wants to remove that protection. His goal appears to be to simply lock up people without having to prove them guilty at trial.

Quinn admits that prosecutors’ “traditional approach to bail on serious cases was to ask the court to set a high cash bail that most defendants could not make.” In other words, “the imposition of very high bail, which cannot be explained simply by the need to assure the accused’s presence at trial and his noninterference with the pretrial process,” was used by prosecutors to lock up poor people accused of serious crimes. Mendonza v. Com., 423 Mass. 771, 781 (1996). Rather than following the law and requesting bail to ensure the defendant’s appearance in court, prosecutors asked for bail to keep people locked up. Now that they can no longer perpetrate that fraud, they need another mechanism to accomplish the same goal.

Replacing high bails with pretrial detention per 58A is just a more modern method of locking up people without ever having to prove them guilty at trial.

Prosecutors know that convincing a jury of a person’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is much more difficult than convincing a judge that the person is “dangerous” by clear and convincing evidence. So if they can convince a judge to lock someone up as a “danger,” they can incarcerate people without having to go before a jury.

Prosecutors also know that when people are locked up they are more likely to plead guilty. A recent study in American Economic Review found that people who are locked up are 24.5 more likely to plead guilty. See The Effects of Pre Trial Detention on Conviction, Future Crime, and Employment: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Judges by Will Dobbie, Jacob Goldin, and Crystal Yang. American Economic Review 2018, 108(2): 201–240 (https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20161503).

Moreover, Quinn’s call to lock up “dangerous” people indefinitely is especially appalling in Bristol County, where his political ally, Sheriff Hodgson, runs two brutal jails where people are denied medical care, subjected to solitary confinement more than any other county jails in Massachusetts, and which account for more than 25 percent of county jail suicides in Massachusetts — despite only having 13 percent of county inmates. This combination of prosecutorial zeal and carceral sadism leads to a high rate of people desperate — virtually compelled — to accept unfavorable plea deals.

Quinn also seems to be unperturbed that the lack of a speedy trial combined with the presumption of guilt until trial results in unconstitutional jail sentences for those never convicted of a crime. Quinn writes, “the time frame must be increased to one year in both the district and superior courts. Yet any rational attorney would agree that cases in superior court, where the most dangerous defendants are prosecuted, cannot be tried within six months. Unless this unrealistic time limit is expanded beyond the current 180 days in superior court and 120 days in district court, we will continue to see dangerous defendants released back into our communities.”

Several of Quinn’s claims can only be made if he is truly ignorant of what happens in Massachusetts courts or cynically misrepresents judicial reality. Time limits of 120 and 180 days for pretrial detention under dangerousness statutes are illusory. Those time limits are extended based on events such as the defendant filing pretrial motions. Any rational attorney would agree that motions to dismiss or suppress must be litigated in the types of cases where pretrial detention is sought — firearms cases, drug trafficking, and sexual assault. Yet the time that elapses between the filing of those motions and their resolution extends the 120/180 limit. If that takes 60 days (good luck getting such quick turnaround), the defendant is held for an additional 60 days.

And the right of the Commonwealth to seek pretrial detention renews after indictment. If a prosecutor seeks detention in District Court and the person is held, that person may wait 30-90 days to be indicted and arraigned in Superior Court. Once there, the prosecutor may seek a new order of pretrial detention. If granted, the 180 limit starts all over again. Virtually every public defender in Massachusetts knows that imprisonment without trial under dangerousness statutes is considerably worse than Quinn describes.

Hearings required before someone can be detained before trial provide practically no due process protections. Hearsay is almost always permitted, which means that a defendant is deprived of their right to question witnesses. Evidence is often admitted without determining authenticity. Offenses that a defendant has never been convicted of, such as dismissals, are used against them. These are the proceedings that Quinn wants to use to hold defendants indefinitely.

At any given time between 60 to 70% of all prisoners are unconvicted and in pretrial detention. In the February 2018 issue of the American Economic Review cited above, Will Dobbie, Jacob Goldin, and Crystal S. Yang demonstrated that “pretrial detention significantly increases the probability of conviction, primarily through an increase in guilty pleas. Pretrial detention has no net effect on future crime, but decreases formal sector employment and the receipt of employment- and tax-related government benefits. These results are consistent with (i) pretrial detention weakening defendants’ bargaining positions during plea negotiations and (ii) a criminal conviction lowering defendants’ prospects in the formal labor market.”

In other words, pretrial detention is not just unfair and unjust — it’s extremely costly to society.

The same research also shows that reducing pretrial detention actually reduces crime. “Pretrial release may decrease future crime following case disposition through two main channels. First, pretrial release may decrease crime if pretrial detention is criminogenic because of harsh prison conditions and negative peer effects. Second, pretrial release can reduce future crime through an increased likelihood of employment, which subsequently discourages further criminal activity.”

The study estimated the economic cost of needless incarceration to be between $50,000 and $100,000 per detainee: “While a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis is beyond the scope of this paper, we consider a partial back-of-the-envelope calculation that takes into account the administrative costs of jail, the costs of apprehending individuals who fail to appear, the costs of future criminality, and the economic impact on defendants. […] Based on these tentative calculations, we estimate that the total net benefit of pretrial release for the marginal defendant is anywhere between $55,143 and $99,124. Intuitively, pretrial release on the margin increases social welfare because of the significant long-term costs associated with having a criminal conviction, the criminogenic effect of detention which offsets the incapacitation benefit, and the relatively low costs associated with apprehending defendants who miss court appearances.”

* * *

Tom Quinn bears considerable responsibility for the miserable overcrowding in the county jails he has filled, whose inmates are subjected to abusive conditions by the sheriff. Just like Hodgson, Quinn was first appointed by the governor after his predecessor’s resignation and then ran unopposed in primary and general elections in 2016. DA Quinn ran unopposed in 2018 and is already promoting a Republican Governor’s bill to claw back gains made in reforming abuses in our “Criminal Justice” system. But Quinn is typical of many DA’s and the public had better start paying attention.

Americans love invasions. Trump and his Republicans are on the warpath this week against Venezuela. We’ve heard precious little criticism from either party of Donald Trump’s recognition of “self-declared” president Juan Guaido. Democrats generally remained silent in 2009 when Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, supported a coup in Honduras. And today the “liberal” press still loves US interventions. The New York Times is all but calling for a US coup in Venezuela (“That Mr. Maduro must go has been obvious for some time.”) and the Washington Post ran an editorial by Guaido calling Maduro a “usurper.”

So it was really only a minor, and extremely temporary, aberration in 2013 when Secretary of State John Kerry told the Organization of American States (OAS) that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” As the UPI reported: “Kerry’s declaration of the end of the Monroe Doctrine era was greeted with hesitant applause among the OAS delegates.”

The OAS had every reason to be suspicious.

It may be useful to recall what the Monroe Doctrine really was — just a few sentences in President James Monroe’s 1823 message to Congress:

“We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

Students are taught that the Monroe Doctrine declared that American interests in the Western Hemisphere consisted mainly of the benevolent protection of smaller countries from aggression by the world’s colonial superpowers — France, England, and Spain. Monroe’s assertion that “we have not interfered and shall not interfere” was as quickly abandoned as it was declared. Scarcely twenty years later the United States invaded Mexico. Monroe’s Doctrine, seen in historical light, was actually a declaration that the US fully intended to get into the superpower business itself.

Since then the Doctrine has been interpreted to mean that the US has every right to interfere in its neighbor’s affairs — and the protection of neighbors has nothing to do with it. As the list below shows, there hasn’t been a decade in which the United States didn’t interfere by invasion or imposition of dictatorships.

And we wonder why we have so many refugees at our southern border.

Still not convinced the US is a malevolent imperialist nation? Stephen Kinzer’s book The True Flag is an account of the moment the United States fully embraced Imperialism and never looked back.

One scholar has documented exactly how we have lived up to Monroe’s promise that “we have not interfered and shall not interfere.” I’ll bet you didn’t learn this in Social Studies class:

A border wall may be a stupid idea (“show me a fifty foot wall and I’ll show you a fifty-one foot ladder”), but that doesn’t matter to a monomaniacal constituency holding the nation hostage to its white supremacist agenda.

Trump and his FOX News cheerleaders claim that America is being invaded. Alabama Republican Congressman Mo Brooks compared the “invasion” of asylum seekers to 9/11: “Let’s look at 9/11 by way of example. We lost 3,000 people more or lesson 9/11. That justified going to war in Iraq, Afghanistan and our troops are still there to varying degrees.”

But the desperation of Central American refugees is a problem decades of American “interventions” caused. And when desperate people show up at your door it’s not a home invasion but the result of economic and political instability we created in places like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

The Libertarian CATO Institute disputes Trump’s claim that the situation on the border is any worse than in previous years. During both Bush and Obama administrations, in fact, Border Patrol agents actually turned away more immigrants than today. It’s also clear that Trump’s wall-inspired shutdown has nothing to do with national security. If it were, “non-essential” TSA employees, air traffic controllers, and the Coast Guard would all be drawing paychecks. Besides the insane wall, Trump’s immigration policies include deportation of people who never committed a crime (DACA and TPS recipients), increased de-naturalization of citizens, and political attacks on the U.S. Constitution’s conferral of citizenship to anyone born here.

It’s clearly not about safety. It’s about keeping America as White as possible for as long as possible.

Republicans never liked Presidential orders when a Black president was writing them. But now, with a white supremacist in the Oval Office, they sure have changed their tune. For the last two years Donald Trump has displayed his signature on many an order — and that’s just fine with the GOP.

With the longest-ever national shutdown still in progress, Trump has decided to take autocracy to a new level — threatening to declare a National Emergency if he can’t get his wall through political negotiations. This move is one more milestone in the erosion of American democracy but it is also troubling that the president’s base would support such a declaration without any credible evidence of a real emergency. They don’t want a president. They want a caudillo.

But Republicans should really ask themselves if they want to go down this road of government by decree. If so — and with Trump’s precedent — the next Democratic president will be able to use the same new powers to declare national emergencies to solve a long list of serious, neglected crises:

• grant permanent residency to DACA and TPS recipients;
• re-open abortion clinics across the country;
• stop the epidemic of gun deaths in the United States;
• fix poisoned water systems in Flint, Newark, and elsewhere;
• end poverty and homelessness by expanding the social safety net;
• raise minimum and set maximum wages;
• order the implementation of Medicare for All;
• establish a comprehensive jobs program to provide 100% employment;
• end voter suppression;
• relieve Puerto Rico of its crushing debt;
• take immediate steps to reduce CO2 emissions; and
• declare invalid the DOJ memorandum sparing sitting presidents from prosecution.

“We are a nation of laws.”

I’m sure you’ve heard this one before, and it may even ring true if you were born white — in which case you can also get presidential pardons or concierge service in the courts. But this is a lie we tell ourselves. And by “we” I mean white people.

But if you were born poor, brown, black, or without American citizenship, the “nation of laws” claim often rings as hollow as a November pumpkin.

Just ask Cyntoia Brown, who was enslaved into sex work and had to shoot her rapist to escape. Brown was sentenced to 51 years in prison for the killing and, despite wide support for clemency, was not on Tennessee governor Bill Haslam’s list of 11 people granted clemency on Thursday.

On the flip slide, Jeffrey Epstein — a friend of Donald Trump’s — received a relatively light sentence of 13 months in jail for raping dozens of underaged girls. One of his victims was even recruited at Trump’s Mar Lago resort. Epstein’s prosecutor, Alexander Acosta — also a friend of Trump’s — worked out the gentlemanly plea deal entre blancs and went on to become Trump’s Secretary of Labor.

If you think Epstein, Trump, and Brett Kavanaugh are exceptions to how society winks at white sexual predators, consider this case from last week. In Louisiana a white Baylor University frat boy convicted of rape got a $400 fine and probation — and that was it. Jacob Walter Anderson walked away after paying a fine, his life and freedom intact. No jump suit, no 51 year sentence.

“These people need to get in line for citizenship.”

When it comes to refugee status, asylum, work visas, and citizenship, we white people cloak ourselves in the same sorts of lies.

From the beginnings of the nation until 1924, only white people were allowed to legally immigrate. The Chinese Exclusion Act was based on claims that Chinese were immoral, criminal, brought smallpox, opium, and could not be culturally absorbed — virtually every lie that today’s FOX News commentators repeat about Central American refugees.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1922 that a Japanese businessman named Takao Ozawa was not a Caucasian and therefore did not qualify for citizenship. A case three months later involving an Indian, Bhagat Singh Thind, ruled that Indians were not Caucausians and Thind actually had his citizenship stripped. If you’ve been paying attention to Trump’s immigration policies, renewed threats of denaturalization and the movement to abolish the 14th Amendment are revived assaults on people of color in a long, continuous, racist history.

So let’s be clear. For almost all of our history there was no immigration line for anyone except white people. And a story from this week’s news illustrates a related fact — that, besides demonizing people of color, the “system” has continuously provided legal advantages for white immigrants — even to this day.

Outgoing “moderate” House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has persistently blocked help for DACA recipients and reforms which would benefit Latinos and other brown people, submitted bill H.R. 7164, written to let Irish nationals use some of the 10,500 annual Australian visas — thus ensuring that white people are directed to the head of the immigration line.

Sláinte!

Meet E. Michael Janson, New Bedford’s perrennial mayoral candidate.

Janson is 69 years old, a graduate of New Bedford High and, according to his Ballotpedia profile, has worked at some 50-odd jobs and run for mayor nine times.

In 2011 Janson ran for mayor of New Bedford, largely on an anti-immigration platform. In 2013 he ran for New Bedford School Board. In his candidate questionnaire he offered to sacrifice his winters in Florida for the greater good of the citizenry, proposed tracking students, eliminating student “distractions” in classrooms, and fining the parents of students who skipped school.

Janson came in dead last in a pack of seven candidates.

In 2015 Janson ran for an At-Large City Council seat. In a campaign video demonstrating his talent for free-association, Janson objects that New Bedford is a sanctuary city where “illegals” take thousands of jobs away from graduating high school seniors, which in turn causes a dreaded psychological condition: “I call it SSI. Shitty Self Image.” This in turn, he goes on, leads to heroin, and heroin can only be fought by letting the police hire dozens of informants. Again blaming “ousiders,” Janson slams Section 8 housing because it’s filled with “undesirables” who “come into our city, they become lousy tenants, and they’re not preparing their kids for an education, so consequently our schools are suffering because these — they’re not doing a good job of preparing their kids. And it’s not the teacher’s job to do that. My mother used to work with me with flashcards. I doubt anyone here in New Bedford is working with their kids with flashcards.” In 2017 Janson lost another bid for the At-Large City Council seat. Again.

Since about 2007 Janson has had a running battle with the Standard-Times, which infuriated him by calling him a “perennial mayoral candidate” — which (to be fair) his Ballotpedia profile proves that he is. A piece by Jack Spillane in the Standard Times pointed out that Janson was running for his “at-large” seat from an address which was actually a New Bedford garage on Rockdale Avenue without running water. Listing a series of lies and half-truths Janson spouted in the 2007 mayoral race, the Standard Times concluded: “Mike Janson, you’re full of baloney.”

For a long time Janson repaired to the one sanctuary where all whackadoodles go to lick their wounds — talk radio. I won’t mention any names or call numbers, but this New Bedford station (like the White House) is where people full of baloney go to be treated like royalty and inflict their ignorance on the rest of us. Here Janson has found his peeps. A man without any public policy skills, little education, and who could never teach in a public school himself, Janson nevertheless has a talk-radio opinion on everything — immigration, austerity, schools, economic priorities, public housing, foreign trade zones, taxes.

But it’s 2018. Janson may still be full of baloney but it’s time for another campaign. This time he’s challenging Tony Cabral for the Massachusetts House 13th Bristol District. Cabral should have nothing to worry about, but in today’s political climate, no one should ever be complacent.

Rep. Tony Cabral is putting out a call for volunteers to help #TeamCabral on his re-election campaign.

Team Cabral is hosting a Volunteer Organizational Meeting this coming Monday, September 24th, at 6pm, at the GSM Labor Council, 560 Pleasant Street, New Bedford. They will have coffee and doughnuts and will be talking about all the different ways people can get involved.

If you can’t make it to the meeting, but would like to help, please reach out to Team Cabral at reptonycabral@gmail.com and they will figure out how to plug you in!

Take nothing for granted. Elections always matter.

Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here — written in 1935 when America had seen the likes of Father Coughlin and Huey Long, and when Lewis could see the Third Reich barreling down on Europe — features a protagonist who was “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected… He was an actor of genius.”

Spoiler alert: fascism comes to America. The back cover says it all.

A recent set of Gorsuch-weighted Supreme Court rulings have finally given Republicans something to crow about. The court’s approval of Trump’s Muslim Ban seemed like a blast from the German Vergangenheit but recent labor and reproductive rights rulings have been equally disturbing. Mitch McConnell and Neil Gorsuch met for a photo-op to troll Democrats. Their meeting demonstrated just how badly “checks and balances” work in this country and how shattered American democracy really is.

But while the extreme right exults in the belief that their Crusaders have finally pulled off a Reconquista, let’s remember the Dred Scott decision. Then, as now, the case reflected a Supreme Court that had totally lost its way — and the irreconcilable differences between Americans’ views of what sort of nation we want to be.

Dred Scott was a slave who sued for his and his family’s freedom in a state where slavery was illegal. In 1846 Scott filed suit from St. Louis, Missouri, where since 1824 there had been legal precedent for recognizing the freedom of escaped slaves: “Once free, always free.” Scott’s wife Harriet was friendly with Abolitionists who championed the family’s legal case. Scott lost the suit, re-filed and appealed, and lost again. In 1857 his case was again heard by the United States Supreme Court.

On March 6th, 1857 the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 against Scott. Chief Justice Roger Taney delivered the majority opinion, which was that Africans, free or not, could not be citizens of the United States. “The right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.” Furthermore, African-Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Consequently, freedom and citizenship could not be conferred upon non-whites and, since by the court’s criteria Scott was not a citizen, Scott had lacked “standing” to bring the suit in the first place.

The South did a victory lap. The Richmond Enquirer wrote, “A prize, for which the athletes of the nation have often wrestled in the halls of Congress, has been awarded at last, by the proper umpire, to those who have justly won it. The nation has achieved a triumph, sectionalism has been rebuked, and abolitionism has been staggered and stunned.”

But the Charleston, South Carolina Mercury speculated that this was just the beginning of a greater conflict between North and South: “In the final conflict between Slavery and Abolitionism, which this very decision will precipitate rather than retard, the principles of the judgment in the Dred Scott case may be of some avail to the South in giving an appearance of justice and moderation to its position.”

The Supreme Court had ruled in favor of White Supremacy and slavery but now it was the law. Abolitionists mocked the reckless, immoral ruling and doubled their efforts to end slavery. Ultimately Dred Scott, just as the Mercury had predicted, ignited a national conflagration that overturned slavery and destroyed the South.

Modern-day slavers and reconquistadores want to return us to 1857. America is as deeply divided now as it was then, and the prospects of a Trump Court for decades is deeply unsettling. But the fight for America’s soul is far from over. The arc of justice is frustratingly long but it will arrive. Whether in 2018, 2022, or later — Congress will pass into younger, browner, more progressive hands. Laws will be written to make legally explicit our liberties, protecting them from capricious, partisan rulings. The Trump Court will shuffle around in their robes, dreaming of Dred Scott.

This my last appeal for citizens to advocate for protections for immigrant families in the 2019 budget. Originally proposed as Budget Amendment #1147 by Senator James Eldridge, these protections have been incorporated into Senate Bill S.2530 and are now in conference with the House. Call your State House Representative to ask them to support immigrant family protections. What’s happening in Washington should terrify and motivate state House Democrats to support such protections. This should be our answer to hate.

Here’s why the protections are so important

The Supreme Court just ruled in favor of Trump’s Muslim Ban. An ACLU petition asks Congress to pass legislation to block racist exclusions like this. While a ban is not the same thing as a registry, we don’t yet know how Trump’s Muslim Ban will affect citizens of the Muslim-majority countries who live in Massachusetts, whether CPB, ICE, or DHS will ask the Commonwealth to help track these Muslim neighbors — or if the occasional law enforcement official might have personal motivations to share data with ICE without authorization.

• Protections for immigrant families in the 2019 budget bar the Commonwealth from cooperating with such registries.

Trump’s deportation machine is abusing families and children in shockingly cruel ways. Elizabeth Warren has a lengthy report on her visit to a McAllen, Texas Border Patrol facility where she was horrified by the treatment of incarcerated children. A report issued recently describes racially-motivated abuses of detainees in ICE facilities, including the Bristol County House of Correction. Last week it was reported that the Boston Public Schools took it upon themselves to share data with ICE, and on the Cape high school students were reported to ICE by guidance counselors for supposed gang affiliations simply because they spoke Spanish. This insanity must end. Let police deal with real criminals and end vigilantism.

• Protections for immigrant families in the 2019 budget prevent state officials from being used as federal agents. Only the Massachusetts Department of Corrections will be able to fulfill some of these federal immigration functions.

Customs and Border Patrol is stopping vehicles on parts of I-93 and demanding that passengers produce proof of citizenship. Warrantless stops with requests for “papers!” is creepy and totalitarian enough without state and local police being enlisted in violations of the Fourth Amendment. Even with the 100-mile border “loophole,” many of these stops are unconstitutional. Let’s affirm that, at least in Massachusetts, a “nation of laws” requires warrants and probable cause to stop people.

• Protections for immigrant families in the 2019 budget define strict rules under which police officers can ask about immigration status and require training on the law for all officers.

Read about these provisions yourself. Despite malicious misinformation, these provisions do not prevent police from arresting real criminals. They do make Massachusetts a lot safer for everyone and strengthen Constitutional protections many of us can still remember once having.

Call your State House Representative to ask them to support protections for immigrant families in the 2019 budget.

Book Review: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild. ISBN: 9781620972250

This is a frustrating, disappointing book. It is a book that will make no one happy. Carlos Lozada’s review in the Washington Post, for example, accuses Hochschild of condescension and preconceived notions about the Tea Party. The former is partly true. I don’t think the author successfully manages to disprove the view many have of the Southern Far Right — that they’ll believe any stupid damned thing and will stubbornly vote against their own self-interest. But some Tea Partiers actually liked her book. Ralph Benko, writing in Forbes, called it a “delight” — which might be going a bit overboard.

I found myself wondering where Hochschild was headed in her “exploratory” and “hypothesis generating” study. It took over a hundred pages to lay out her thesis, finally described in Chapter 9, “The Deep Story.” From time to time Hochschild acknowledges the racism of the South, but there is really only one page (146-147 in the hardcover edition) devoted to it. Instead, environmental protection is the lens through which she timidly chooses to look at values of Louisianans. In Chapter 14 (“the Fires of History”) Hochschild discusses the shocks to poor whites following the Civil War that might account for so many today still holding racist views and repressed class antagonisms (think Faulkner’s “Abner Snopes”). But, again, it’s only mentioned in passing.

Ultimately, Hochshild’s book is a fool’s errand. It’s impossible to bridge the empathy gap with people who themselves have no empathy for anyone but White Christians. And, though her efforts to empathize with people who reject science, fact, and blame all their problems on others, may be praiseworthy, I just can’t bring myself to do it. These are seriously delusional people who have given up on remediating their fracked bayous because they think the Rapture is the proper solution for environmental problems.

There is some truth in right-wing critiques of the book, like Lozada’s, that the book paints cartoon characters. In order to explain her subjects’ irrational, dangerous, delusional, anti-social, and self-destructive views and behaviors, Hochschild concocts several two-dimensional archetypes — the Team Player, the Worshipper, and the Cowboy. A better analysis would have looked at the effects of generational racism coupled with the toxic effects of propaganda from FOX News and right-wing pastors. And it would have included a critique of Capitalism, a topic Hochschild won’t touch any more than her subjects. But Hochschild’s goal was to befriend them, not to truly explain the pathology.

I’m sorry, but it’s hard to feel sorry for people who home-school their children or indoctrinate them in Christian madrassas, vote to bring cancer-producing industries into their communities, to kill themselves and their children — and then pay the petrochemical companies for the privilege. It’s hard to feel much pity for people who believe every stupid lie they hear on FOX News or from the pulpit and uncritically support the most rapacious version of Capitalism — while blaming every brown face in the world for the failures of their verkakte worldview.

Rather than bridging the compassion gap, Hochschild’s book convinced me that we need to let these people go. Let them secede and form their own Kingdom of Gilead, where they can spend their money on guns, church tithes, and petrochemicals. Let them live with self-inflicted poor health, poverty, superstition, and ignorance until the Rapture vacuums them up.

There are huge and irreconcilable differences between the two Americas. Half of us believe in democracy, the other half in Adam and Eve romping with Ayn Rand around a Deepwater Horizon platform.

Let’s get the divorce over with.

It turns out that Hillary Clinton was right about one thing — Trump’s supporters are Deplorables.

It was a fleeting, and uncharacteristically harsh, judgment from a party now running its own right-to-lifers, gun-toters, and militarists, lip-syncing the GOP’s lyrics that White America was somehow “left behind.” Taking a cue from the GOP, the Clintons’ DNC and DCCC is now downplaying racial injustice in order to court Deplorables with their Better Deal – which Dems announced last Summer from the Heart of Dixie. But their midterm strategy – sending people of color to the back of the bus if not throwing them under it – neglects the stinking rot at the root of our so-called American “democracy.”

A new study by Diana Mutz from the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, debunks the theory that White America voted for Trump because they were afraid of losing their jobs. They were simply afraid of losing their privilege.

Mutz’s abstract:

“This study evaluates evidence pertaining to popular narratives explaining the American public’s support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election. First, using unique representative probability samples of the American public, tracking the same individuals from 2012 to 2016, I examine the “left behind” thesis (that is, the theory that those who lost jobs or experienced stagnant wages due to the loss of manufacturing jobs punished the incumbent party for their economic misfortunes). Second, I consider the possibility that status threat felt by the dwindling proportion of traditionally high-status Americans (i.e., whites, Christians, and men) as well as by those who perceive America’s global dominance as threatened combined to increase support for the candidate who emphasized reestablishing status hierarchies of the past. Results do not support an interpretation of the election based on pocketbook economic concerns. Instead, the shorter relative distance of people’s own views from the Republican candidate on trade and China corresponded to greater mass support for Trump in 2016 relative to Mitt Romney in 2012. Candidate preferences in 2016 reflected increasing anxiety among high-status groups rather than complaints about past treatment among low-status groups. Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white Americans are under siege by these engines of change.”

Another study by Steven V. Miller at Clemson and Nicholas T. Davis at Texas A&M confirms Mutz’s “loss of privilege” theory, and also refutes the notion that democratic traditions inoculate Americans from fascist leanings. In “White Outgroup Intolerance and Declining Support for American Democracy,” Miller and Davis write:

“Democracy has been durable in the United States – so durable, in fact, that serious inquiry into Americans’ attitudes toward it has been uncommon. No more.”

Working from World Values Survey data from 1995 to 2011, Miller and Davis discovered that:

“White Americans who would not want an immigrant/foreign worker, someone who spoke a different language, or someone from a different race as a neighbor are more likely to support strongman rule in the United States, rule of the U.S. government by the army, and are more likely to outright reject having a democracy for the United States. These findings are robust across multiple model specifications we analyze and report in the appendix as well.”

Their study documents the strong correlation between White America’s bigotry and proto-fascist leanings. Once White America perceives that the benefits of democracy are being extended to “others” their commitment to democracy is quickly abandoned. Like a child playing a board game, if they can’t win, they won’t play.

But this hardly comes as a surprise to the rest of America:

“[White] American citizens have not historically exhibited the sort of lofty, normative commitments to things like equality and tolerance that we might expect from one of the richest and longest-running continuous electoral democracies in the world. As Sullivan and Transue (1999) note, most citizens were willing to apply double standards that afforded one set of rights to popular groups while denying rights to more extreme or less popular groups.”

Tinkering with Capitalism may sound like a plan, but Democrats need to do a better of job of defending democracy. The surest way to do this is by defending the rights of all citizens and opposing every institution of an authoritarian, surveillance, and police state America. Once Democrats are back in power – unless they roll back the Patriot Act, stop the endless wars, pare back the military budget, dismantle FISA courts and institute sweeping reforms of the criminal justice system and ensure police accountability – they will have done nothing to rescue what’s left of our shredded democracy.

Scaremongers are busy trying to convince House legislators that one of the FY2019 budget amendments will end life as we know it and plunge the Commonwealth into lawlessness and anarchy. So I have an idea — let’s actually read it ourselves. But first, some context.

The Massachusetts Senate just approved its version of the FY2019 budget, adding several key provisions of the Safe Communities Act as Amendment #1147. These provisions prevent officers of the Commonwealth from being used as federal immigration agents. Police cooperation with federal agencies, including tracking residents in a federal “Muslim” (or other) registry, will be regulated and standardized. Police officers can’t simply go rogue and become junior G-men on the state’s dime. They, like the rest of us, will be subject to Massachusetts law.

Almost one half of Amendment #1147 concerns the establishment of registries. The heart of the budget amendment is the same heart found in the Bill of Rights — everyone, regardless of immigration status, is entitled to know the charges against them, see them in writing, and have a lawyer present during interrogation. Equally important, there is nothing in this legislation barring police from investigating or detaining anyone associated with a crime.

But Charlie Baker has threatened to veto the amendments. Anti-immigrant groups and the extreme right misrepresent them as a threat to public safety. Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson — like Trump, never one to worry about truth — goes so far as to accuse the Senate super-majority which passed the budget amendments of siding with criminals: “This is a case of the lawmakers protecting lawbreakers at the expense of people whose safety they were sworn to uphold.”

In the language of Hodgson’s own immigrant father — this is pure bollocks. Hodgson especially dislikes one of the provisions because it’s going to negatively impact his career as a mouthpiece for FAIR, a white supremacist anti-immigrant organization. He just might have to get back to addressing his own prison suicides, recidivism rates among the highest in the state, the Securus kickback scandal, and five current lawsuits for mal- and misfeasance.

But I digress. So, without further ado, let’s read the budget amendment.

Budget Amendment ID: FY2019-S4-1147

EPS 1147

Definitions

Messrs. Eldridge and Lewis, Ms. L’Italien, Mr. Brownsberger, Ms. Friedman, Ms. Jehlen, Messrs. Hinds and Barrett, Ms. Chang-Diaz, Mr. Crighton, Ms. Creem, Messrs. DiDomenico, Boncore, Welch, Cyr and Lesser, Ms. O’Connor Ives and Mr. Collins moved that the proposed new text be amended by adding the following:

SECTION XX. Chapter 147 of the General Laws is hereby amended by adding the following section:-

Section 63. (a) As used in this section, the following words shall have the following meanings, unless the context clearly requires otherwise:

“Civil immigration detainer request”, any request by a federal immigration officer authorized under 8 C.F.R. section 287.7 or by any other authorized party, including any request made using federal form I-247A, I-247D or I-247N, asking a non-federal law enforcement agency, officer or employee to maintain custody of a person once that person is released from local custody or to notify the United States Department of Homeland Security of the person’s release.

“Law enforcement agency”, any state, municipal, college or university police department, sheriff’s department, correctional facility, prosecutorial office, court, or program of one or more of the foregoing entities, or any other non-federal entity in the commonwealth charged with the enforcement of laws or the custody of detained persons.

“United States Department of Homeland Security”, the United States Department of Homeland Security and its component agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, Customs and Border Protection, and any other federal agency charged with the enforcement of immigration laws.

Police only inquire about immigration status when the law requires it

2. No officer or employee of a law enforcement agency, while acting under color of law, shall inquire about the immigration status of an individual unless such inquiry is required by federal or state law; provided that a judge or magistrate may make such inquiries as are necessary to adjudicate matters within their jurisdiction.

Police will be trained on the requirements of this law

3. All law enforcement agencies in the commonwealth shall, within 12 months of passage of this act, incorporate information regarding lawful and unlawful inquiries about immigration status into their regular introductory and in-service training programs. If a law enforcement agency receives a complaint or report that an officer or employee has inquired about an individual’s immigration status when such inquiry is not required by law, the agency shall investigate and take appropriate disciplinary or other action.

A detained person must be provided a copy of his detainer

4. If a law enforcement agency has in its custody a person who is the subject of a civil immigration detainer request or a non-judicial warrant, the agency shall promptly provide the person, and his or her attorney if the person is represented by an attorney, with a copy of such detainer request or non-judicial warrant, and any other documentation the agency possesses pertaining to the person’s immigration case.

DHS interviews require consent and preserve the right to an attorney

5. An interview between a United States Department of Homeland Security agent and a person in the custody of a law enforcement agency conducted for immigration enforcement purposes shall take place only if the person in custody has given consent to the interview by signing a consent form that explains the purpose of the interview, that the interview is voluntary, and that the person may decline to be interviewed or may choose to be interviewed only with an attorney present. The consent form shall be prepared by the office of the attorney general and made available to law enforcement agencies in English and other languages commonly spoken in Massachusetts. The office of the attorney general may work with interested not-for-profit organizations to prepare translations of the written consent form. The law enforcement agency shall make best efforts to provide a consent form that is in a language that the person understands, and to provide interpretation if needed, to obtain the person’s informed consent.

6. If the person in custody indicates that he or she wishes to have an attorney present for the interview, the law enforcement agency shall allow him or her to contact such attorney, and in the case that no attorney can be present, the interview shall not take place; provided, however, that the law enforcement agency shall not be responsible for the payment of the person’s attorney’s fees and expenses.

State employees may not be used as federal immigration officers

SECTION XX. Chapter 126 of the General Laws is hereby amended by adding the following section:-

Section 40. Agreements to Enforce Federal Law.

No officer or employee of any agency, executive office, department, board, commission, bureau, division or authority of the commonwealth or any political subdivision thereof, with the exception of the department of correction, shall perform the functions of an immigration officer, whether pursuant to 8 U.S.C. section 1357(g) or any other law, regulation, or policy, whether formal or informal. Any agreements inconsistent with this section are null and void.

No cooperation with a federal “Muslim” or other registry

SECTION XX. Chapter 30 of the General Laws is hereby amended by adding the following section:-

Section 66. (a) Under no circumstances shall the commonwealth, any political subdivision thereof, or any employee or agent of the commonwealth or any of its political subdivisions, establish any operation or program that requires, or has the effect of causing, persons to register or check in based in whole or in part on their religion, national origin, nationality, citizenship, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or age, or maintain any records system, government file or database for the purpose of registering persons based in whole or in part on those categories.

2. In the event that any federal government operation or program requires, or has the effect of causing, persons to register or check in based in whole or in part on their religion, national origin, nationality, citizenship, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or age, including but not limited to any such operation or program created pursuant to 8 United States Code, sections 1302(a) and 1303(a):

1. no resources of the commonwealth or any political subdivision thereof shall be expended in the enforcement or implementation of such registry or check-in program;

2. no employee or agent of the commonwealth or any of its political subdivisions shall access, or seek to access, any information maintained pursuant to such registry or check-in program; and

3. no employee or agent of the commonwealth or any of its political subdivisions shall provide or disclose or offer to provide or disclose information to, or respond to a request for information from, such registry or check-in program.

3. This section shall not apply to any government operation or program that: (1) merely collects and compiles data about nationals of a foreign country entering or exiting the United States; or (2) issues visas, grants United States citizenship, confers an immigration benefit, or temporarily or permanently protects noncitizens from removal.

4. Nothing in this section shall prohibit or restrain the commonwealth, any political subdivision thereof, or any employee or agent of the commonwealth or any of its political subdivisions, from sending to, or receiving from, any local, state, or federal agency, information regarding citizenship or immigration status, consistent with Section 1373 of Title 8 of the United States Code.

As promised, I’m sending you the Action Alert I promised last week.

With hope fading for protections for our immigrant neighbors, sitting around doing nothing is not an option. There are several key pieces of Safe Communities legislation that can still make it into the 2019 state budget as amendments. These provisions have broad public support and give critical protections to all immigrants, regardless of status.

Sen. Jamie Eldridge, sponsor of the Safe Communities Act, has filed an amendment advancing four key protections from the bill. His amendment has a good chance of succeeding but we need to get as many Senators as possible to endorse it — and be ready to fight for it.

The “ask” from Senators is simple — take a stand for immigrant families in the Commonwealth by co-sponsoring Senator Eldridge’s amendment #1147. We also want Senators to oppose Senator Fattman’s amendment #1136, which would allow police to detain people for federal immigration authorities.

We are also asking for support for Senator Eldridge’s amendment #176, to boost funding for adult basic education and English classes from $31 million to $34.5 million, and Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr’s amendment #658, to boost funding for the Citizenship for New Americans (CNAP) program from $400,000 to $500,000. Not only should we encourage eligible immigrants to become U.S. citizens — we should provide adequate program funding.

Call your Senator:

First, find your Massachusetts state Senator.

Hello, my name is __________ and I live in [city or town]. I am calling to urge Senator [name] to take a stand for immigrant families by co-sponsoring Senator Eldridge’s amendment #1147. I urge the Senator to advocate with Senate leadership, and vote for the amendment when it comes to the floor. I also support amendment #176 to boost funding for ESL programs, and amendment #658 to boost funding for the CNAP program. In addition, the Senator should OPPOSE Sen. Fattman’s amendment #1136, which would end protections gained under the Lunn decision. Massachusetts should be taking the lead in protecting immigrant families. Anything less in the Trump era is unacceptable. Thank you for taking my call!

Call the Senate Leadership:

You can reach Senate President Harriette Chandler at 617-722-1500 and Senate Ways & Means Chairwoman Karen Spilka at 617-722-1640. The message for them:

Hello, my name is __________ and I live in [city or town]. I am calling to urge President Chandler / Chairwoman Spilka to take a stand for immigrant families by supporting Senator Eldridge’s amendment #1147 and OPPOSING Sen. Fattman’s amendment #1136, which would end the protections we won under the Lunn decision. I also urge support for amendment #176 to boost funding for ESL programs, and amendment #658 to boost funding for the CNAP program. Massachusetts should be taking the lead in protecting immigrant families. Anything less in the Trump era is unacceptable. Thank you for taking my call!

Want to make things really easy? Use MIRA’s Phone2Action tool, which automatically connects you — no need to look up names or phone numbers! Keep your call short and sweet. Call volume matters: we want to demonstrate overwhelming support for Senator Eldridge’s amendment. If you get a voicemail, make sure to leave your name, address and phone number!

What else can I do?

Call your Senator and Senate leaders today! Then forward this message to everyone you know. And for the greatest impact, sign up to phone bank with the ACLU on May 17, 22 and/or 23!

American democracy begins with the word “we.” We the People. It’s a tiny word with a Napoleon complex: a third person pronoun appropriate to any group to which the speaker belongs. It seems so obvious yet the meaning of “we” has always been a bit dishonest, and the groups to which “we” belong equally so.

David Swanson’s book Curing Exceptionalism makes this point. In an interview discussing the book Swanson says that, if there is any hope of ending American Exceptionalism, citizens need to be very clear about what is meant when the word is invoked. “‘We just bombed Syria.’ — I didn’t bomb Syria. Did you?” he asks. “At least part of the time, try to see if you can make ‘we’ mean a smaller or larger group than a nation.”

When a white supremacist says “we are a nation of laws” while advocating for the deportation of brown people, what he really means is that current laws apply to brown people, not the colonists who took the land from them. That’s a whole different “we.”

Or when a liberal repudiates torture because “this is not who we are,” he’s speaking only for himself and not about the torture long practiced by police, the military, or foreign despots trained at American institutions like the School of the Americas. Torturers are most certainly who we are.

Sometimes the problem is that state propaganda uses “we” when referring to government policies it wants citizens to rally around. Dissidents, such as young Jews who oppose the Israeli occupation, say “not in my name” to make it clear that their views differ from what are assumed to be mainstream Jewish views about Israel.

Sometimes the problem is that “we” are ignorant of belonging to a group or even knowing much about that group. Most White Americans, for example, don’t really think of ourselves as a separate racial category. We don’t recognize white privilege and we don’t question its generational benefits. After all, we’re the “default.” Everyone else is a category — at least until you start trying to see through another man’s eyes.

And this brings us back to American Exceptionalism, nationalism, and overt racism. All are founded on the notion that “we” have some God-given right to privileged status — whether it be a white man in the boardroom or the American ambassador at the UN Security Council. It matters little that White America spans different European (and non-European) cultures, languages, socioeconomic and educational levels. Like an AMEX card, membership has its privileges. When an individual chooses membership in a “we” based on a ridiculous proposition — that skin color, religion or nationality say more about us than common struggles and interests — that choice is clearly all about the privilege.

The more you ponder the word, the less “we’ makes much sense. Though long banished from polite conversation, Americans having an honest reckoning with race and class would do the most to transform a scatter of unhappy, divided individuals into a truer version of the word”we.”

And only after we have sorted out our common domestic identity will we be able to sit down at the UN as just one nation among many others.

Donald Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” has little to do with greatness — and his supporters damn well know it. In word and deed the GOP has become the party of white racism and xenophobia. You’d think Democrats would want to do a better job of standing up for multiculturalism and human decency.

That’s what you’d think.

So it’s difficult to understand why, nationally, so little has been done to help DACA recipients as they twist in the wind. Or why Massachusetts House Speaker Bob DeLeo has done everything he can to shelve the Safe Communities Act (SCA) — not to mention most progressive pieces of legislation. Even a compromise SCA bill, which gave assurances to law enforcement, has gone nowhere.

With hope fading for protections for our immigrant neighbors, sitting around doing nothing is not an option. There are several key pieces of Safe Communities legislation that can still make it into the state budget as amendments. These provisions have broad public support and give critical protections to all immigrants, regardless of status.

Stay tuned. Next week the Massachusetts Safe Communities Coalition will be calling upon everyone to take to the phone banks and call up state legislators to approve these amendments. I will be forwarding details.

Say yes to multiculturalism. Say yes to human decency.

On April 4th both houses of the Massachusetts legislature passed long-overdue criminal justice reforms. A huge omnibus bill now awaits Charlie Baker’s signature and Democrats will soon learn how moderate a Republican the governor really is. If the bill is signed and reforms make it into law, then next steps in fixing abuses of the criminal justice system should include police accountability and prison reform.

American courts are filled with brown and black and poor people guilty of relatively minor economic and drug offenses. Offenders are processed by zealous DA’s and the courts move them efficiently along a carceral assembly line greased by plea deals. Following often long and severe jail time devoid of any rehabilitation, a prisoner’s remaining rights and dignity are stolen. Former inmates can’t vote, they can’t find jobs, and they frequently have nowhere to live. The Pell Center described this irrational and costly mean-spiritedness:

“Americans are imprisoned for crimes that may not lead to prison sentences in other countries such as passing bad checks, minor drug offenses, and other non-violent crimes. Also, prisoners in the United States are often incarcerated for a lot longer than in other countries. For instance, burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England. [And] with an emphasis on punishment rather than rehabilitation, U.S. prisoners are often released with no better skills to cope in society and are offered little support after their release, increasing the chances of re- offending.”

On April 3rd WGBH’s Greater Boston ran a segment on one prison reform measure that could return a little rationality to the American criminal justice system. Investigator Cristina Quinn looked at Middlesex Sheriff Peter Koutoujian’s program for youthful offenders focused on rehabilitation, based on German practices recommended by the Vera Institute, and first pioneered at Connecticut’s Cheshire Correctional Institution.

According to Quinn, German prison reforms are based on a post-Holocaust Constitution which affirms human dignity. In addition, Germany’s 1976 Prison Act specifically defines prison as rehabilitation and tries to make the experience useful for both prisoner and society. The Prison Act’s first principles state:

• By serving his prison sentence the prisoner shall be enabled in future to lead a life in social responsibility without committing criminal offences (objective of treatment).
• Life in penal institutions should be approximated as far as possible to general living conditions.
• Any detrimental effects of imprisonment shall be counteracted.
• Imprisonment shall be so designed as to help the prisoner to reintegrate himself into life at liberty.

Cruel and pointless punishments are expressly prohibited.

Even municipal laws in Germany protect prisoners. In 2008 Berlin passed a Juvenile Detention Act which gives special protection to young offenders. Berlin’s 2010 Remand Centre Act protects those in detention who have not [yet] been convicted of a crime. A 2011 Berlin ordinance governs how prisoner data can be used. A 2013 Preventive Detention Act rules that inmates kept in preventive detention beyond their sentences (such as sex or violent offenders with psychiatric problems) have the right to extra housing and treatment options.

The incarceration rate in the USA is 8-9 times higher than in Western Europe. At present ours is 666 per 100,000 citizens. In contrast, Canada’s is 114; Germany’s 77. Berlin, with a population of 3.5 million, has 2,800 inmates in its 8 prisons (a rate of 80 / 100,000). In Bristol County, with a population of 561,000, the county jail has 1,400 prisoners in 3 facilities — an incarceration rate of 250 / 100,000. Bristol County has a recidivism rate of 34% in a state with an average recidivism rate of 32% over 3 years.

A 2005 study conducted by the Justice Department tracked 400,000 offenders throughout 30 states and calculated a national recidivism rate of 76% over 5 years. A 2005 U.S. Sentencing Commission study found that almost half of all federal offenders were re-arrested within 8 years. One way to look at it is that 2.5 million incarcerated Americans form a small nation of hopeless savages. Or so the law-and-order types tell us.

But a contrarian view held by William Rhodes argues that the reverse is true — that, nationally, two-thirds of all offenders never return to prison and only 11% return to prison more than once. The problem with the Justice Department statistics, Rhodes writes, is that “offenders who repeatedly return to prison are like frequent mall visitors — they are overrepresented in samples used to estimate the rate at which offenders return to prison.”

“Locking up the same people over and over points to failures in the American penal system,” as one study noted. But whatever the precise percentage of recidivists, the fact remains — American prisons don’t spend much effort on rehabilitation. Norway, with an incarceration rate of 75 per 100,000, invests in rehabilitation and socialization and does not torment its offenders for life. As a result Norway has one of the world’s lowest recidivism rates — 20% compared with 52% in the United States. It is not surprising to discover that one of Norway’s maximum security prisons, Bastoy, with a recidivism rate of 16%, is run by a clinical psychologist and its guards receive three years of training.

Even in more traditional European prison settings one does not find the deprivation, starvation, isolation, and brutality of American institutions. An English-language brochure from Berlin’s Department for Justice and Consumer Protection describes their focus on helping inmates: “Taken as a whole, the Berlin prison system views it­self as a system of enforcing therapy and treatment designed to address both the deficits of prisoners and their competences.”

Since 1980 a massive prison services industry has developed in the U.S. and segments of it serve even states without private prisons. Inmates are gouged at prison stores or for usurious telephone and video conferencing schemes. Outsourced medical, drug, and psychological services of questionable quality may be provided or denied at whim. Food throughout U.S. prisons is often substandard or insufficient. Abusive corrections officers, arbitrary solitary confinement, and overcrowded facilities are all too common hallmarks of American prisons. In some institutions prisoners are denied family visits.

In a German Justizvollzugsanstalt (prison), or JVA, cells are open during the day, inmates cook for themselves, and the law guarantees family visits. Inmates wear their own clothes, live in dorm-like clusters with other inmates, may receive gifts from their families, and obtain outside psychological and drug treatment services. Of course, prisoners are still locked up — but they don’t forget, or they learn, the importance of getting along in society.

Programs like this — and corresponding legal protections for the incarcerated — are necessary so long as we deprive shocking numbers of our fellow citizens of their liberty.

In The House of the Dead Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” If Dostoevsky was right, then the jailers — and not our incarcerated neighbors — may be the true nation of savages.

The suitcase under the bed

What would you do if immigration agents came for you and separated you from your children? Breaking apart families was never a central mission of previous Republican and Democratic administrations, but with Trump many parents are now faced with having to plan for unimaginable cruelties of a racist deportation machine. It may not be 1935 but, if you are someone sleeping with a packed suitcase under the bed, it sure feels like it.

On Thursday Helena daSilva Hughes of the Immigrants Assistance Center and Corinn Williams of the Community Economic Development Center, both in New Bedford, hosted a workshop given by the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute’s (MLRI) Emily Leung. Roughly 40 attendees represented a spectrum of local social service, academic, health care, and legal organizations and they had come to learn about legal tools immigrants can use to protect the welfare of their children if they face deportation.

Leung discussed the Trump administration’s “shift in enforcement,” which was a diplomatic way of describing ICE’s shift from deporting dangerous individuals to going after the easiest people to round up. The MLRI attorney discussed adaptations to, and the function of, the Caregiver Authorization Affidavit and Temporary Agent Appointment documents, both already in use within the Commonwealth. Neither of these legal documents grants guardianship of a child to another adult — a last resort if a child is young and the deportation is irreversible — but they permit a caregiver to make important decisions for a parent who can no longer advocate for her own children.

It was a lively meeting with many questions asked and answered. Leung dispensed practical advice on storing and collecting identity and travel documents — and ending by stressing the importance of committting important phone numbers to memory. By the time you need to make that phone call you’re already in ICE custody — and they’ve got your phone.

For more information go to the MLRI website or to Mass Legal Help. You can find workshop resources in English and Spanish — and more translations would be welcomed.

Attorney General Maura Healey’s office has published a similar Emergency Planning Guide for Families in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Haitian Creole.

* * *

The Immigrants Assistance Center (IAC) and the Community Economic Development Center (CEDC) both perform important work of helping immigrant families — whatever their status.

Check out the Benefit Concert for the IAC at the Greasy Luck Brewpub, 791 Purchase St., New Bedford, MA 02740, on Saturday, February 24th, from 5-8pm. Buy your tickets here.

And please support the work of the CEDC by making a donation.

Last week social networks were buzzing with reports that UMASS Dartmouth had rescinded the 2017 acceptance of a black student who had been honest about prior gang affiliations. Right after Martin Luther King day, and right in the middle of Black History month, a young black man had new options snatched away by nervous administrators at a campus in a lily-white community. At a campus meeting on Monday angry students voiced concerns about racism and fairness.

The university for its part shed absolutely no light on the issue. According to a campus spokesman, “We’re just not going to be engaged in a conversation about an admissions case about an individual student.” Whatever the actual facts, the university’s ham-handed refusal to discuss circumstances or safety concerns — or to engage in a “conversation” with students or the wider community — will with good reason be interpreted as a coverup of some good-old-fashioned racism, and less as the well-intentioned effort to keep students safe. The university might as well have invoked “national security.”

UMASS Dartmouth is a public university. Many of us studied there. Many of us know students, employees, faculty, ex-faculty, and regularly attend campus events. Before it joined the UMASS system it was very much a local university, and it still is. In every way it is our university. And the public is entitled to some answers. The administration must open up about the circumstances and reasoning behind changing its mind about this student. And it must publicly and transparently deal with concerns that this was racism again rearing its ugly head in the age of Trump.

Universities are full of people with all sorts of baggage. The UMASS university system was once run by Whitey Bulger’s brother. Despite suspicions he knew where his fugitive brother was hiding, it never seemed to keep William Bulger off a campus or prevent him from becoming president of the Massachusetts Senate. Plenty of white students have had offenses expunged from their records. But this particular student never had the same courtesy extended to him. Despite his best efforts to take a different path in life, this young black man has now been barred from the university for a past that men like him are never permitted to escape.

On January 20, a conference entitled “Mass Incarceration as a New Jim Crow” was held at All Souls Church of Braintree, Massachusetts, on a topic that concerns everyone — mass incarceration and its implications. Well organized and attended, the conference featured a panel of five guests.

The conference began with an historical overview of the “Old Jim Crow” presented by Dr. Elizabeth Herbin-Triant from UMass Lowell, dealing primarily with the period following the Civil War and Reconstruction. Dr. Jon Huibregtse from Framingham University followed Dr. Herbin-Triant with an overview of historical changes and context through the post World War II period.

The speakers focused on the idea that the implementation of Jim Crow laws and lynchings served a larger purpose of maintaining a powerless work force, preventing growth of an independent economy beyond control by the white ruling class, and suppressing dissent. At the same time, the widespread popularity of spectacle lynchings and retribution indicates the depth of a culture of racism that goes beyond the upper classes.

With the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed for “separate but equal” institutions, systemic racism was fully established. Lynchings and extra-judicial executions continued, but grew less as other institutions assumed these functions, most notably an explosion in incarceration and legalized racism, combined with political disenfranchisement. One of the most shocking statistics was that of registered black men in Louisiana, which declined from 130,000 in 1896 to 1,232 in 1904!

Following the historical overview, the panel spoke and took questions from the audience. Franklin Baxley from the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition spoke to the human toll and incredible inequities of the current system. Rahsaan Hall, Director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, spoke eloquently of the economic and social mechanisms by which systemic racism enables the “pipeline” from schools to prison. Susan Tordella, of E.M.I.T. (End Mass Incarceration Today) spoke of the need to include incarcerated people as participants in the discussion.

Several members of the audience then jumped into the discussion, asking questions about the economics and politics of mass incarceration, the possibilities of change, and methods of organizing. This led directly to the discussion after the break as to what the situation is today in Massachusetts and what is to be done. Several organizations were mentioned in addition to the speakers’ own groups.

Susan Tordella discussed the status of the CJ Omnibus Bill, which, though far from perfect, contains some positive pieces of legislation. The Massachusetts Bail Fund was mentioned as a very effective way of helping people post bail who would otherwise be thrown into the penal system before they are even convicted.

One key aspect in the discussion was raised by Rahsaan Hall, who pointed to the incredibly important roles played by District Attorneys in determining whom to charge and what charges to bring. He also pointed to a lack of accountability for these same DA’s, suggesting that bringing political pressure on them is a powerful way of changing the way the system operates. He asserted that accountability of District Attorneys (and county sheriffs in Massachusetts as well) to external oversight and control of any kind is nearly non-existent.

The conference ended with a plea to everyone to become more involved in shining a light on these dark areas of accountability, working with incarcerated people, and demanding more structures of accountability.

Most of those we spoke with agreed that it was a worthwhile conference, and though much of the material was familiar, it was presented in a context that really helped clarify issues. Strategies on what can be done were a little less fully explored since panel participants were already involved in their projects. Some of the audience wanted to learn about concrete steps they could take, and the panel was helpful in that regard. For BCCJ, the comment on District Attorneys by Rahsaan Hall made it clear that Correctional Justice issues in Bristol County must also address the roles of the District Attorneys and their accountability.

We haven’t read Michelle Alexander’s powerful book yet, but it was recently in the news for being censored in New Jersey prisons. The INTERCEPT noted the irony: “Michelle Alexander’s book chronicles how people of color are not just locked in, but locked out of civic life, and New Jersey has exiled them even further by banning this text specifically for them,” said ACLU-NJ Executive Director Amol Sinha in a statement. “The ratios and percentages of mass incarceration play out in terms of human lives. Keeping a book that examines a national tragedy out of the hands of the people mired within it adds insult to injury.”

RELATED to this, there is a conference on racist mass-incarceration on January 20th in Braintree.

• Saturday, January 20, 2018 from 9 AM to 1 PM
• All Souls Church, 196 Elm Street, Braintree, MA 02185

A panel of five people will present views and discuss issues we face regarding mass incarceration as, in the words of Michelle Alexander, a racial caste system that requires a great social movement to effectively deal with it. Her argument is that today’s criminal justice system functions as a framework of social oppression and political suppression, comparable to those of Jim Crow and Slavery, and requires serious consideration.

FEATURING: Elizabeth Herbin-Triant of UMass Lowell, and Jon Huibregtse of Framingham State University to talk about what our society faced under Jim Crow and relate that to what we face today. Franklin Baxley, Director of the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, Rahsaan Hall, Director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, and Susan Tordella, from End Mass Incarceration Today, will talk about the issues we face and initiatives under way to build democracy and oppose racial injustice.

Please click here to register for the conference.

Anyone want to carpool?

Last night’s special Senate election in Alabama was balm for weary Liberals — and possibly even held a silver lining for Conservatives. With the repudiation of a xenophobic bible-thumping bigot with multiple accusations of child molestation, Alabamians can almost look themselves in the mirror this morning. Together, Democrats and Republicans breathed a sigh of relief that a man so foul would not be taking a seat in the Senate.

Tennessee GOP Senator Bob Corker called Moore’s defeat “a great night for America.” Florida GOP Senator Marco Rubio tweeted: “For their good sense people are praised, but the perverse of heart are despised. Proverbs 12:8,” But these were exceptions from a party that generally stands for everything Moore represents.

For Americans the closely-watched election had everything in it — race, sex, religion, authoritarianism. It was at once a referendum on the role of religion in government and America’s search for its soul. Although America may have dodged a bullet, the slim margin said a lot about the country’s tenuous relationship to democracy, equality and civil liberties. Ezra Klein put the narrow Democratic “win” in perspective:

“If Moore had merely been a candidate who believed Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to serve in Congress, that the laws of the United States of America should be superseded by his interpretation of the Bible, that homosexuality should be illegal, he would have won in a landslide. Even multiple credible reports that Moore serially preyed on teenage girls were barely enough to lose him the election. […] Like Donald Trump before him, Moore is proof that there is no depravity so unforgivable, no behavior so immoral, that it assures a candidate will lose his party’s voters.”

Mark Galli, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, in a piece yesterday, had plenty of criticism for Christian liberals but saved his harshest words for conservative Evangelicals:

“The race between Republican candidate Roy Moore and Democratic candidate Doug Jones has only put an exclamation point on a problem that has been festering for a year and a half — ever since a core of strident conservative Christians began to cheer for Donald Trump without qualification and a chorus of other believers decried that support as immoral. The Christian leaders who have excused, ignored, or justified his unscrupulous behavior and his indecent rhetoric have only given credence to their critics who accuse them of hypocrisy. Meanwhile the easy willingness of moderate and progressive Christians to cast aspersions on their conservative brothers and sisters has made many wonder about our claim that Jesus Christ can bring diverse people together as no other can.”

Aspersions aside, the facts are these: White Alabamians, in their perversity, overwhelmingly chose a racist multiply-accused of pedophilia who doesn’t really believe in the U.S. Constitution over a Democrat who successfully prosecuted the Klan. And it was black Alabamians — black women, especially — whom the nation can thank for their display of the “good sense” mentioned in Proverbs 12:8.

The Alabama election should dispel any notion that Democrats must abandon so-called “identity politics” and throw their efforts instead into chasing “angry white voters.” Angry white voters don’t vote for them. When Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and other Democratic luminaries announced their “Better Deal” in Berryville, Virginia, it was a harebrained effort to appeal to white populism. But the Democratic Party is a party of diversity, the working class is much broader than the DNC seems to understand — and that’s where the party’s power must come from. Last night black Alabamians wanted the DNC to remember that.

Before the election, when asked if black Alabama voters would turn out in sufficient numbers, Birmingham City Councillor Sheila Tyson replied, “The problem isn’t going to be with the black voters. If Jones doesn’t win, it’s not our problem.” But black voters delivered. After the votes were in, Democratic strategist Symone D. Sanders told a Newsweek reporter, “Doug Jones would not have won today without the turnout we saw from African-American voters. […] Black women have been absolutely clear in their support for Democratic policies and Democratic candidates. It’s high time for Democrats … to invest in that effort.”

Which was a polite way of telling the Democratic Party to stop focusing on big donors, and losing battles with racists, to democratize and start showing some respect for voters of color who just saved their asses.

But bringing real democracy to the Democratic Party won’t happen easily. In the Monday New York Times Julia Azari and Seth Masket penned an opinion piece, “Is the Democratic Party Becoming Too Democratic?” In it they object to the DNC Unity Commission’s moves to reduce the number of superdelegates and open up the party to [shudder] Sanders supporters. They write that “part of the problem for parties is our insistence that they be run democratically. That turns out not to be a very realistic concept […] party leaders will always have vastly more information about candidates — their strengths and flaws, their ability to govern and work with Congress, their backing among various interest groups and coalitions — than voters and caucusgoers do. That information is useful, even vital, to the task of picking a good nominee.”

Richard Eskow in his dissection, “Democrats Need More Democracy, Not Less” does a great job of refuting Azari and Masket’s argument, pointing out that — repeatedly — party insiders have either championed candidates who were doomed the moment their names appeared on the ballot — or sabotaged candidates who were objectively more “realistic” than the poor choices insiders made. The 2016 Presidential election was no exception.

If the Alabama election teaches us anything, it’s that the Republican Party has completely lost whatever soul it ever had. Democrats, on the other hand, still have theirs. It’s right underfoot, but they’re knocking around in the dark trying to figure out where the hell they left it.

The New Bedford Branch of the NAACP is celebrating its 100th Anniversary!

On December 10, 1917, the National Board of the NAACP chartered the New Bedford Branch, joining a long history of struggle for civil rights and social justice across the nation. Recently a UMASS Dartmouth branch was formed to work with the city chapter. The New Bedford chapter was formed only eight years after the NAACP itself was established.

To commemorate its centennial, the New Bedford NAACP Branch is holding a 100th Anniversary Gala on (Saturday) December 16, 2017 at White’s of Westport, 66 State Road in Westport, Massachusetts.

The keynote speaker for this event will be Ms. Clayola Brown, President of the A. Philip Randolph Institute in Washington D.C. and former National NAACP Board Member. The event will feature a cocktail hour, dinner, music and dancing, an awards presentation, and a historical review of the New Bedford NAACP Branch. The occasion promises to be a memorable event to mark the anniversary of the chartering of a branch of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization.

Mark your calendars and please support this tremendous milestone in both national and local history. Tickets for the semi-formal event are $75.00 each and may be purchased by contacting Mr. Peter Silva via e-mail at degbor.silva2@comcast.net. If you can’t attend, buy a ticket anyway and earmark it for a student.

Before the light of brotherly love totally flickers out in this country, it might be a good time to support those fighting for civil liberties and the rights of all of us.

See you on the 16th!

Download the flyer here.

The culture wars are nothing new.

Even a hundred years ago White America had seen the writing on the wall. It knew its power was about to peak and would eventually decline. It also knew that culture war would be a potent brake on the process.

And so the Western canon — a curriculum exalting Western empire — was developed. In 1909 Harvard University’s 51-volume “Harvard Classics” was published. It represented what any well-educated man of the time should know. The Classics were overwhelmingly those of ancient Greek and Roman empires and the rising colonial empires of Europe and America who saw themselves as rightful inheritors. Three non-Western texts were included — the Sayings of Confucius, the Bhagavad-Gita, and several surahs from the Qu’ran. But it was largely a white, Christian — and overwhelmingly male — curriculum.

In 1952 Great Books of the Western World was published by Encyclopedia Britannica. This time the volumes targeted not an academic audience but businessmen who wanted to fill in educational gaps — and put some nice-looking books on their mahogony shelves. Robert Hutchins, a founder of the project along with Mortimer Adler, announced the books at a ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria, saying: “This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind.” One meaning the selection made crystal clear — only the West was of importance to a well-educated man. Confucius, the Hindus, and Muhammad had been banished from even token appearances this time around.

In 1994 academic Harold Bloom — no WASP but another old white male who called himself a “Jewish Gnostic” — came up with another reading list promoting Western civilization: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Bloom’s list focused on 26 authors and now represented what some were calling the Judeo-Christian tradition, although he had added a smattering — and a strangely idiosyncratic selection — of “international” writers. Despite being an update for a post-war America that had received undeniable contributions from Jews, Bloom’s “canon” remained one more reading list of largely dead white men written by a member of a slightly, and only reluctantly, enlarged club.

Around this time another Bloom — University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom — published The Closing of the American Mind, which argued that abandoning the Western canon would dumb down students, plunge them into moral relativism, and that modern (and international) culture was bereft of civilizing influences. The book became required reading for neoconservatives like Dinesh D’Souza who himself published one with a similar theme. But what disturbed conservatives the most was that students and academics questioned whether the Western canon actually represented all that was best about the “democratic” Western world — or whether its main purpose was to defend reactionary, colonial, and elitist traditions. Even the other Bloom — Harold — chimed in: “We are destroying all intellectual and esthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences, in the name of social justice.”

Social justice. God forbid.

The Civil Rights movement had been a shock, and the Sixties were bad enough for conservatives. But now students at Ivy League institutions were turning their backs on the Western world — or at least looking occasionally in other directions. These students were painted as lazy, spoiled children of privilege or angry, ungrateful, minority upstarts spitting on what democracy, consumer culture, and affirmative action had graciously afforded them. They wanted to read post-Colonial literature — Black Americans, Africans, Palestinians, Latin Americans, and Asians. Conservatives saw college students under the sway of Svengali academics attacking all that European civilization had done for those they had colonized.

For decades Joseph Campbell was known for books on mythology, comparative religion, and literature. Even today Campbell’s studies of the folk tale and, specifically, the “Hero’s Journey,” are known by just about every working screenwriter — and now even ISIS. But while the Western canon’s treatment of mythology was limited to Europe — mainly Greece, Germany, and Scandinavia — as early as 1952 Campbell slammed the omission of other cultures in his introduction to the Viking Press Portable Edition of Arabian Nights. Campbell took specific aim at the Great Books:

“… it is remarkable how little is admitted of the Muslim contribution to our culture by those histories (hundreds appear every year) that rehearse the outdated schoolbook story about the Greeks and the Renaissance. In a recent list of”Great Books” not a single volume (save the Bible) is named from east of Suez: Calvin is there, but not Mohammed; Hobbes, but not Confucius; the Iliad (which for the past twenty-five hundred years has had no influence whatsoever on civilization, save as an unmastered model for the litterateurs), but not the Mahabharata (which, during the same period, has been the spiritual sustenance of billions of the world’s living people). One searches in vain for a single Buddhist text (the dominant faith of about one-third the world’s population), a single Oriental philosopher, a single poet or novelist of the great Chinese, Japanese, Arabian, or Hindu traditions. Such a list, in the present century, is ridiculous, and would be incredible were our Occidental megalomania not one of the most conspicuous of the world’s present ills.”

Occidental megalomania, indeed.

Fast forward seventy years and most would acknowledge that the old white men lost the Canon wars. But they do keep trying. In 2008 Americans elected a black president who had spent considerable time as a youngster in Asia — and white America didn’t like it. In 2010, former MIT literature professor, playwright, and old white man A.R. Gurney — best known for a play about a dog — wrote Office Hours, a contrived swipe at lazy plagiarizing students preoccupied with social justice and political correctness — and nasty academic feminists griping about old dead white men. Office Hours was a passionate defense — and among the last I can recall — of the Great Books, and the play had a mercifully short run.

Having lost the Canon wars, Conservatives now have abandoned their traditional role of defending tradition. Nowadays when it comes to higher education, their new strategy seems to be gutting the humanities, focusing on STEM education, licensing fly-by-night for-profit universities, embracing flat earth anti-intellectualism, rejecting science, and embracing creationism.

By the time the 2016 election rolled around, the old white men were in full panic. As always, the deck they had stacked and the bizarre election rules they had written guaranteed their presidency — even while losing by three million popular votes. But the gnarled white knuckles of these men are still clenched in a death grip on the levers of government, commerce, and culture.

But they can’t hold on forever. The known world today is no longer quite so flat, quite so white, quite so male, or quite as Western as it was in 1909.

On Saturday, October 7th, from 5-6:30pm the City of New Bedford’s Department of Community Services and the Asian Pacific Law Students Association at UMASS Law will present a roundtable discussion on community building. The disussion will center around the story of Vincent Chin, whose case sparked the Asian-American civil rights movement depicted in the film Vincent Who?

Speakers include Martin Bentz from the Islamic Society of Southeastern MA, and Thomas Curnalia and Jared Picchi from Human Rights Clinic.

For more information, contact Mali Lim at 508-961-3020 or email mali.lim@newbedford-ma.gov.

Download the event flyer here.

In case you’re curious about Vincent Chin, some context:

Who Is Vincent Chin? The History and Relevance of a 1982 Killing

Why Vincent Chin Matters

The Case Against Vincent Chin

* * *

Unrelated to Vincent Chin – except perhaps for our national dedication to violence – was Sunday night’s massacre in Las Vegas. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that it was a resident of Mesquite, Nevada – the state with the most lax gun laws in the country – who could assemble enough paramilitary firepower to create this kind of carnage.

In 2013 I snapped this photo in the Las Vegas airport. In Nevada, apparently, machine guns are just a part of the culture – a culture of violence.

Yesterday was a dark day for everyone except the white supremacist regime that currently runs this country. Almost a million young Dreamers – Americans in every sense except documentation – will be expelled with the stroke of a presidential pen unless Congress throws them a lifeline. While 2017 is certainly not 1933, it probably feels like it if you’re a Dreamer.

Maybe we should be looking at German history to see how quickly a country can run off the rails. The same history tells us how deeply expulsion hurt Jewish refugees, how painfully friendships, love, and social bonds between Jews and non-Jews were destroyed when an entire people was legislated out of existence. German history also reminds us of the enduring national trauma that white supremacist policies caused – now going on a century later.

We should remember what happened.

In 1933 Hitler’s National Socialists passed a law for the restoration of German jobs. The whole purpose of the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums was to make Germany great again for white protestant civil servants.

The gesetz protected German jobs from “foreigners” – non-Aryans. How easily economically-insecure lower and middle class Germans turned on Jews who had lived among them – centuries before Germany was even a nation. German Jews were Germans in every sense – but how easily and arbitrarily they were re-defined as aliens, separated from friends and family and German society with the stroke of a pen.

The president of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg, a military man with the gravitas of John McCain, was offended that Jews who had served at the front during WWI were included in the bans, and he wrung a concession from the Nazis. But Hindenburg died the following year and with him so did the concession. Dismissals from the civil service were swift and severe, and expulsions began. People like Albert Einstein, for example, saw the writing on the wall and fled.

In total, 340,000 Jews of lesser fame and resources than Einstein were forced to flee as refugees, often with little time to uproot an entire lifetime in Germany. After all, they were Germans with few connections to any of the foreign lands to which they had to escape. These were among the first victims of Nazi policies and almost a third of them perished in the Holocaust.

Then in 1938 the night known as Kristallnacht occurred. It was a nightmare of shattered glass and shattered lives. It was the beginning of the end for German Jews. The gloves were off. Germany would be a nation for Germans. Germans didn’t know it at the time, but it was also the beginning of the end for Germany.

And the nightmare had started only five years earler with the expulsions.

By now most people know that Donald Trump announced (via Jeff Sessions) that the DACA program will end in six months. Trump’s decision overturns one by Barak Obama to provide temporary protections for “childhood arrivals” in the absence of a permanent legislative solution. Since 2001 the DREAM Act has foundered in Congress, and today’s

Cancellation of DACA passes the buck to Congress to pass its own Dreamer legislation

In addition, Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders appeared to admit that

Preserving DACA is a form of extortion designed to preserve Trump’s unnecessary and unpopular wall

Read up on the DREAM Act Legislation itself:

S.1291, the original DREAM Act was introduced in 2001 by Orrin Hatch

Senators Durbin and Graham reintroduced a new DREAM Act on July 20 2017

Text of S.1615 – the new DREAM Act (2017)

Text of H.R.3440 – the House version of the new DREAM Act (2017)

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Petitions, legislative contacts, information and conference calls:

ACLU PeoplePower

FCNL Conference Call

FNCL Petition to Restore Protections

Here to Stay – Top 5 Things to

MIRA Coalition – What you can do as a DREAMer – or ally

Our Revolution

DON’T FORGET

This month things are heating up in Congress. Stay awake and pay attention:

Congress’s Packed September Agenda

After he was elected Donald Trump crowed, “this is the day we take our country back.” The Orange One’s supporters knew what his dog whistle meant. White supremacist Richard Spencer announced: “We won. America belongs to white men.” His buddy Jared Taylor told ABC News journalist Amna Nawaz: “we built a wonderful country that your ancestors could not have [built]. That is why people like you come here.” Taylor put into words what many white Americans believe – that the nation is the crowning achievement of Christian white people and that it’s their country.

But history professor Joe Krulder isn’t buying the myth of America as a lily white nation. In “America was never White” Krulder provides numerous examples of the diversity that actually built America, and of a much more complex history – not simply white settlement – that made the nation.

The founding myths of America that white supremacists like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor are flogging almost seem to have been taken from Nazi and Soviet era propaganda. White farmers braving cold Dakota winters in sod houses, nobly attacking the land with scythes, or pictures of muscular white tradesmen hammering iron or forging the beams of American skyscrapers. It’s quite romantic.

And it’s also a crock. Historians can tell you that the real America was conquered by genocide, ethnic cleansing, and violence. Much of our national wealth was accumulated by stealing the lives and labor of those regarded as less than human and pressing them into slavery. White supremacy had to be invented to justify slavery, but white supremacy has proven to be both versatile and extensible in justifying America’s many wars of choice on brown and yellow people around the world.

White supremacy, in fact, is such a major strand of our national DNA that it leads many to believe that we are something grander than a nation among other nations, that we have a divine mission to minister to our benighted brown brethren in other countries, guide them, murder them if necessary, deliver to them our great institutions of democracy and capitalism through the barrel of a gun. Every aspect of our society – from economic inequality to the prison system – is based on white supremacist myths that people like Spencer and Taylor have long been selling. Even our first black president, a man who lived in other cultures, considered himself an advocate of American Exceptionalism.

Charlottesville reminded us again of this when racists and Nazis mobilized to defend Southern “heritage” in the form of a Confederate statue. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center there are at least 1,500 monuments to the “lost cause” of the Confederacy, many of them built by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV).

The Daughters of the Confederacy describes itself as a patriotic organization. But like Spencer and Taylor the UDC promotes a revisionist history. It is “an organization which has for its purpose the continuance and furtherance of the true history of the South and the ideals of southern womanhood.” The “true history” the UDC is selling is “a heritage so rich in honor and glory that it far surpasses any material wealth.”

Likewise the Sons of Confederate Veterans is committed to “the vindication of the cause for which we fought. […] the perpetuation of those principles […] and those ideals which made him glorious and which you also cherish.” Glorious slavery.

But don’t believe me. Believe the slavemasters themselves. The Constitution of the Confederate States spells out the Confederate glories in detail. Slavery is mentioned no less than a dozen times in the document, and it was such a central, glorious “ideal” that the Confederate Constitution contained a clause which prevented slavery from ever being abolished.

But if we really want to look at Southern heritage, let’s begin where the Civil War began – in South Carolina.

The first settlements in the Carolinas date from 1640 to 1650. A second wave of colonists, slave traders from Barbados, arrived in 1665, and a third wave came in 1670 to what is now Charleston, South Carolina. They were a quarrelsome, violent bunch. Authoritarian government, political intrigue, dissension, murder and insurrection were the rule rather than the exception. Brotherly love among white colonists might have been a Christian notion but it was nowhere to be found. British Anglicans prohibited French Protestants from owning land in the colony, for example.

For this, after all, was colonialism. Competitors had to be fought and killed, natives had to be “repealed and replaced.” In 1713 Carolina’s colonists forced Tuscorara, Westoe and Coree Indians to flee north where they were eventually assimilated by the Iroquois. Despite colonial treaties many Indians were pressed into slavery and shipped to the West Indies to serve on plantations. It seems triply obscene that Jeff Sessions won’t let them back in their country.

The French, English, and Spanish were all in the New World to conquer it. And they hated each other. It is laughable to think of Spencer’s and Taylor’s fairytale notion of a monolithic European culture at America’s founding. Queen Anne’s War was a colonial dispute over conquered Spanish territory that played out all over the North American continent. Indians in the Carolinas – when they were not being whipped and shipped into slavery – were pressed into the ranks of militias on both the French and English sides.

But then there are the demographics. If, as white supremacists argue, America was always a white Christian nation, then the early American population should have been demonstrably white.

But census data easily disproves this notion.

Throughout the Deep South, for much of our early history, slaves outnumbered whites. It was slaves who farmed the land. In cities many slaves were skilled tradesmen and artisans. Besides white brethren who refused to see them as such, it was also slaves – and the children of slaves – who were hammering on American iron. Go to Charleston, South Carolina and you can see hundreds of pieces of the enduring iron work of Philip Simmons, who learned his craft from a former slave.

During World War I the 371st Infantry Regiment numbered many black Americans from South Carolina. Pershing didn’t see much use for them and he actually handed over the regiment to French command. But numerous members of the 371st received the Croix de Guerre and the Order of Légion d’Honneur. Then they returned to a nation they had just defended but never heard the phrase: “thank you for your service.”

Census figures from the early 1700’s show a consistent non-white majority in South Carolina until 1920 – that was the year that white people finally edged past 50.38%. The nation was 150 years old; whites could finally claim South Carolina was white.

White supremacist myths can’t hold up to history and fact. It may be true that the reins of the economy have always been in white hands, but the work of building and defending America was done – and always has been done – by those rarely given their rightful credit.

The nation can’t take much more of this. This week alone Donald Trump has edged us uncomfortably closer to both nuclear and civil war.

Anyone disappointed by Trump’s unwillingness to condemn white supremacists and fascists should hardly be surprised. Anyone who believes the GOP’s repudiations of white supremacy should remember how hard Republicans fought for Trump’s cabinet picks and national security appointments (below). And anyone who would like to give the 45th president of the United State the benefit of the doubt on his recent comments should remember that white supremacy is a tradition in the Trump family.

Trump has got to go. Either by impeachment or the 25th Amendment, either is fine by me. And those in the following gallery of haters – half of whom are Trump-appointed white supremacists – should all be shown the door.

• Steve Bannon, Chief Strategist and Senior advisor – white nationalist, Islamophobe and anti-immigrant
• Lou Barletta, Immigration Policy advisor – white nationalist and anti-immigrant
• John Bolton, Unofficial National Security advisor – Islamophobe
• Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development – Islamophobe
• David Clarke, Dept. of Homeland Security – Islamophobe
• Kellyanne Conway, Senior advisor and former campaign manager – Islamophobe
• Monica Crowley, Director of Communications at the National Security Council – Islamophobe
• Jon Feere, Dept. of Homeland Security – white nationalist and anti-Semite
• Michael Flynn, Former National Security advisor – white nationalist, Islamophobe and anti-immigrant
• Frank Gaffney, Unofficial National Security advisor – Islamophobe
• Newt Gingrich, Unofficial advisor – Islamophobe
• Katharine Gorka, DHS Landing Team advisor – Islamophobe
• Sebastian Gorka, National Security advisor – white nationalist, Islamophobe, anti-immigrant, with connections to actual Hungarian Nazis
• Pete Hoekstra, Unofficial National Security advisor – Islamophobe
• Julie Kirchner, Customs and Border Protection advisor – white nationalist and anti-immigrant
• Kris Kobach, Immigration Policy advisor – white nationalist, Islamophobe and anti-immigrant
• Clare Lopez, Unofficial National Security advisor – Islamophobe
• K.T. McFarland, Former National Security advisor – Islamophobe
• Stephen Miller, Senior Policy advisor – white nationalist, Islamophobe and anti-immigrant
• Heather Nauert, State Department spokesperson – Islamophobe
• Walid Phares, Foreign policy advisor – Islamophobe
• Mike Pompeo, CIA Director – Islamophobe
• Jeff Sessions, Attorney General – white nationalist, Islamophobe, and anti-immigrant
• Peter Thiel, Transition Team advisor – white nationalist and anti-immigrant
• Beth Van Duyne, Dept. of Housing and Urban Development – Islamophobe
• Frank Wuco, Homeland Security advisor – Islamophobe
• Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior – white nationalist, Islamophobe and anti-immigrant

Yesterday’s terror attack in Charlottesville reminds us how openly America’s white sheets and brown shirts have been displayed for years, and how dangerous they’ve always been – especially since Donald Trump’s embrace. White supremacists and neo-Nazis were in Charlottesville this week as part of white supremacist Richard Spencer’s “Unite the Right” rally. They were in town to protest the removal of a Confederate statue, a lingering symbol of slavery. Yesterday former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke was out singing Trump’s praises, while the night before Spencer was carrying Klan torches.

And then James Fields, a member of Vanguard America with a Hitler haircut, tore through a pedestrian mall in his Dodge Challenger, mowing down dozens of people and killing one. Most media outlets reported the terror attack as part of a “clash” that occurred at a protest, but after years and dozens of right-wing attacks, the attack illustrated the need to start taking American fascism seriously.

The Great new America Trump promises is founded on toxic, racist and authoritarian politics we haven’t seen since 1925. That was the year the United States had 4 million members of the Ku Klux Klan. Now racists and fascists feel emboldened to march in public. After all, they’re in the White House.

The Trump campaign finally found its winning ticket with a third campaign manager, an anti-Semite with a soft spot for neo-Nazis who tapped into the American cesspool of racism and authoritarianism. Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is an unrepentant segregationist. Three of his advisors, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka, have ties to neo-Nazi groups. America’s white supremacist in chief himself receives daily cabinet briefings. And, as the NAACP pointed out seven years ago, the House’s Tea Party members are riddled with racist and neo-Nazi elements.

After the Charlottesville attack Republicans issued a series of insincere repudiations of white terror, but took pains not to alienate their base. Paul Ryan, for example, called white supremacy a “scourge.” But scourge or not, racists comprise a majority of Trump’s supporters. David Duke reacted to Trump’s not-quite-a-condemnation of the terror attack, warning: “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror and remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.”

And the GOP knows it. They courted it. They count on it.

Unfortunately Democrats have little inclination to fight back. Whether by denial, PTSD, or Stockholm Syndrome, the DNC seems to be moving toward the right along with the Republicans. Rather than convincing DNC leaders that political centrism is an empty husk, the shellacking the party took in 2016 appears to have made it even less willing to be the party to defend Americans from institutionalized racism and bigotry.

When Democrats unveiled their Better Deal marketing strategy, they did so only a hundred miles from Charlottesville, focusing strictly on economic issues – making it clear their purpose was to attract Southern white voters. This appeared to be a repudiation of the “identity politics” some hold responsible for the loss of the 2016 Presidential election. Jamil Smith wrote in Vanity Fair that the Democrat’s new campaign is wrapped in Red, White, and Blue and doesn’t dare tread on issues of social justice: “Party leadership seems to want a divorce from identity politics. Or a trial separation, at least.”

A piece in the New York Times right after the election by Mark Lilla (“The End of Identity Liberalism“) castigated liberals for celebrating diversity instead of commonality. Lilla advised liberals to turn their backs on civil rights “issues that are highly charged symbolically […], especially those touching on sexuality and religion. Such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. […] America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.” But it wasn’t just bathrooms. As Lilla observed, it’s every issue pitting fundamentalism against secular Americans.

In retrospect, the DNC seems to have listened to Lilla and those like him. Besides backing away from “identity politics” the DNC now won’t even unequivocally support abortion rights. Secularism and multiculturalism, it seems, are not to be major efforts of the new Democratic Party.

Steve Phillips, columnist, civil rights lawyer and author, hammers the DNC’s “Better Deal” as not only a repudiation of America’s true majority but as a case of moral delinquency:

“Rather than draw a line in the sand, speak out against that, summon people to their highest and best selves to actually embrace a multi-racial country that we have, the Democrats are putting their head in the sand and ignoring that and simply trying to go after this economic message, which is both mathematically unfounded as well as morally delinquent in terms of speaking up to the outrages and the attacks on the various communities of color and the other marginalized groups in this society that this administration is doing.”

The GOP is 89% white, while that number is 60% for Democrats. For decades it has been up to the Democratic Party to defend civil rights of all types – abortion, voting rights, wage parity, marriage equality, privacy – rights the GOP works so tirelessly to dismantle.

But now the DNC has handed in its resignation at the worst possible time.

The petition

Last month I signed a change.org petition demanding the reinstatement of Lisa Durden, an adjunct professor at Essex County College in New Jersey. Durden is also a well-known media commentator who in that capacity crossed swords with Tucker Carlson on FOX News, only to lose her part-time teaching job two days later. On the surface it seemed like just another case of an American discovering the limits of the First Amendment.

But as I read more, the story had components that touched on issues of race, gender, corporatism, worker protections for part-timers, and censorship of all types:

• A Black Lives Matter chapter in New York City wanted to celebrate the black roots of Memorial Day — the roots of which most Americans are ignorant.
• The American Right is always looking for an opportunity to smear Black Lives Matter.
• Durden came to BLM’s defense and was censored and insulted as both a black person and as a woman.
• Two days later the “senior management executive” of her community college fired her because free speech and academic freedom are inconvenient luxuries for an institution in crisis — and also because adjuncts are a cheap, disposable resource — just the way corporate America likes it.

Durden’s experience encapsulates a lot that’s wrong with America.

FOX News and Friends

On June 6, 2017 Lisa Durden, who had previously appeared on the Kelly File at FOX News, appeared on the Tucker Carlson show, also on FOX. Carlson began his segment by showing viewers selected quotes from a Black Lives Matter invitation to a blacks-only Memorial Day Party in New York City. FOX News viewers knew where this was going: demonization of Black Lives Matter, best known for raising hell about the American epidemic of police murders.

But Carlson omitted two key facts in his “set-up”: first, the party was a single event in a single city; and second, the organizers wanted to celebrate the black origins of Memorial Day [more on this in a minute]. Carlson also conflated a single celebration with the entire Black Lives Matter movement — which is actually an umbrella organization with many different tendencies and numerous white allies — and then he asked Durden to respond:

“… I thought the whole point of Black Lives Matter, one of the points would be to speak out against singling people out on the basis of their race and punishing them for that, because you can’t control what your race is, and yet, they seem to be doing that. Explain that to me.”

This was supposed to be an easy score against BLM’s supposed hypocrisy but Durden insisted on putting it in context — something ill-suited for FOX viewers.

The reality of White Privilege

Now, Lisa Durden is no shrinking violet. She is equal parts public intellectual and showman. And there is a very good reason FOX kept asking her back, particularly to debate FOX’s black reactionary Kevin Jackson on police violence — conflict sells. Durden also has a tendency to tune her BS-detector right up to the max. On this particular evening, when Carlson asked her if it wasn’t racist to have a black-only party Durden responded:

“Boo hoo hoo, you white people are angry because you couldn’t use your white privilege card to get invited to the Black Lives Matter, all-black Memorial Day celebration. Wow! Let me contextualize that for you –“

And that was enough. Carlson had heard “White Privilege” and it effectively short-circuited portions of the brain related to high-level executive function. He was seeing White and he was seeing Red. In addition, a woman was challenging him. And not only that, Carlson had heard a strong black woman refuse to play along with his patronizing attempt to catch her in a transparent trap. Carlson interrupted Durden, going so far as to cut off her microphone. She had actually dared to offer viewers an explanation for a black celebration of Memorial Day — to “contextualize” it, as she put it. But Carlson just wasn’t having any.

“No, you don’t need to contextualize anything for anyone considering your logic is nonexistent and your racism abundant.”

Durden’s unsympathetic “Boo hoo hoo” was probably the trigger. But now there would be no opportunity to hear Durden’s reasoning, though she tried unsuccessfully to be heard, to explain to viewers that Memorial Day was a commemoration first celebrated by South Carolina slaves. But the FOX segment only went downhill from there.

Nevertheless she persisted

“A man is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of man” (Corinthians). “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord” (Ephesians). Today’s white male Republicans love to drag their conveniently medieval theology into the public sphere — whether it’s government or a broadcasting studio.

When Elizabeth Warren argued against Jeff Sessions’ racist history during confirmation hearings, Mitch McConnell invoked an arcane Senate rule barring “insults” to former members of the Senate. When Warren argued Sessions’ record was germane to his confirmation, McConnell angrily defended her harsh censure: “Nevertheless she persisted.” Because once a Good Ole Boy tells you to shut up, you’d better do it immediately.

But if persistence is an offense, derision is a capital offense.

During the same confirmation hearings Desiree Fairooz, a 61-year-old member of Code Pink, was forcibly removed and arrested for laughing at Jeff Sessions. Fairooz chuckled when Republican Senator Richard Shelby praised Sessions’ “extensive record of treating all Americans fairly under the law,” adding it “is clear and well-documented.” It is remarkable that there wasn’t even more laughter. For more on this topic, see Maggie Hennefeld’s excellent piece in LA Progressive, “On the Criminalization of Female Laughter.”

Five years ago, when Megan Kelly was still at FOX, she hosted a segment with the express purpose of attacking Elizabeth Warren’s mention of distant Cherokee ancestry. Kelly asked both Tucker Carlson and black feminist Jehmu Greene whether this was laughable. Greene defended Warren, pointing out that even the Chief of the Cherokee Nation was only 3% Cherokee and calling out Carlson’s racist and sexist dog-whistles: “You see Scott Brown really questioning her qualifications because he has to appeal to white, working-class voters who feel marginalized because of affirmative action. This smells real stank to women who do not like being called on their qualifications.”

Typically, Carlson made it patronizing and personal with Greene, again challenging a black woman’s reasoning: “It’s so offensive and dumb. But leaving that aside, it does provide a window into a system that is fundamentally corrupt that awards people based on their DNA.” Greene then called him out on both the misogyny and racism: “[Your attitude] “is going to appeal to folks like you, voters like you: bow-tying white boys.”

With this past as prolog, Durden’s persistence and derision didn’t go over well with Carlson, or at FOX, the 24 hour racism and sexism channel.

Freedom of What?

Durden’s firing is not unique. People are dismissed, censored, or punished all the time for views employers, schools, advertisers, lobby groups, internet service providers, and even foreign governments don’t like. People can be fired whether they are speaking on or off the clock, as representatives of a group, or simply for themselves. They can be fired for saying nothing but simply being who they are — and that includes being gay or pregnant. They can be fired for being whistle-blowers — even when they are exposing criminal acts.

It’s actually quite distressing how little the First Amendment actually protects freedom of expression.

And it’s not just liberals who run afoul of censorship and retaliation. Bill O’Reilly was fired by FOX by his advertisers, though not because of his chronic sexual harassment. Richard Spencer lost a gym membership expressly because he’s noxious white supremacist scum. Tech entrepreneur Brendan Eich lost his seat on the board of Mozilla for his homophobic views.

Right or Left, in America social and political “norms” must be enforced and outliers punished. On the Left it’s frequently gay-bashers and neo-Nazis. On FOX it’s simply progressive black women.

Academic Freedom

But the First Amendment says that government cannot censor you in word or print. This is commonly understood as applying to public or government entities like community colleges and universities. Durden’s firing should certainly trigger a lawsuit for violation of her First Amendment rights.

And there is also a long tradition in colleges and universities of giving faculty members freedom to say what they want without censorship. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) notes that academic freedom as “common law” has existed since 1940. Many of the rights extended to faculty depend on tenure and teaching status, though there are disagreements among Federal Courts about what rights apply to whom.

Still, the Collective Bargaining Agreement under which Durden was hired “declares its commitment to sustain the principles of academic freedom” as well as “retention of all the adjunct faculty members’ rights as a citizen to free speech and publication. Such rights are not, as such, subject to institutional censorship or discipline.” The only caveat in the contract pertains to “the adjunct faculty member’s unusual influence on the opinions and values of the students with whom the adjunct faculty member works.”

But Lisa Durden never identified herself as an Essex faculty member and was attempting only to influence Tucker Carlson’s viewers, not a room full of impressionable undergrads.

Adjuncts

Community Colleges may be called “colleges” but there is a caste system when it comes to teaching in America’s institutions of higher learning. To put it indelicately, adjuncts like Durden are the fast-food workers of the academic world. The AAUP has attempted to show some solidarity with adjuncts but this has never been translated into anything substantial. Instead, it has been up to advocates like Robin Meade, a union organizer for Moraine Valley Community College, to add rights for adjuncts into contracts.

Yet when Meade spoke out about adjuncts being treated as “disposable resources” at her college she had much the same experience as Durden: The “chief of campus police hand-delivered a letter of termination to Meade at her home. Her college email was immediately cut off and locks were changed on the union office at the college.” Meade appealed to the Illinois Department of Labor Relations and she won. Though this was a labor rights case, it also touched on her rights as an academic.

Seventy-five percent of faculty members in American colleges are adjuncts and, shockingly, they earn less than poverty wages. A majority of adjunct faculty members are women — those facing the most discrimination with tenure track positions. And while 60% of adjuncts in Colorado, for example, are women, they earn significantly less than their male counterparts. And the percentage of adjuncts is increasing nationally, just as part-time workers are increasing in the general labor market.

A typical adjunct can expect to earn $3-$5K for a single semester course. Her union will often — as in Durden’s case — be able to do little for her both in terms of wages or representation. Like Meade, after being fired Durden was denied union representation and treated like a criminal.

Because in the end Durden — like all American workers — was just another disposable resource.

College or Corporation?

While its adjuncts earn $7 to $8 an hour, Essex County College’s president, Anthony E. Monroe, a former healthcare consultant, earns $215,000 every year. Monroe was hired in May to deal with a stream of crises that have plagued the predominantly black college.

In May 2017 the former president and former university attorney were fired for pursuing an investigation of financial misconduct and coverup by the same administrators who terminated them. Both women are now pursuing wrongful termination lawsuits against the college. Essex is also at risk of losing its accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education for “enrollment” and “leadership” issues.

Enter Anthony E. Monroe, Ed.D, MBA, MPH, FACHE.

Monroe’s resume describes him as a “Senior Management Executive” and his own effusive description of his abilities oozes like a jelly donut with corporate flummery:

“Dynamic, energetic, and experienced visionary and strategic executive with 28 year career in complex, world-class institutions that is showcased by an impressive record of leadership and management performance. Significant track record and achievements in delivering strong market, financial, and operational results in very complex and large systems. Recognized for innovative leadership in transitioning underperforming organizations into top producers and guiding others through growth and expansion; skilled in negotiations, changing culture, board relations, creating systemness, improving operations efficiency and project management, driving revenues and market shares, improving productivity and quality, generating savings, enhancing customer satisfaction, managing multi-site operations and integrating systems. Expertise in public health systems operations, physician relations, network development, strategy execution, clinical excellence, financial management, and market growth.”

Monroe came from City Colleges of Chicago, Malcolm X College, where he was president for seven years. He revamped a $251 million dollar campus, put his fingerprints on a $524 million capital plan, oversaw an 80% increase in degrees, saw graduation rates increase by 3%, and so on. Numbers. Widgets. Percentages. And “systemness.”

But Monroe’s other talent was making controversies go away. While president of Malcom X College, Dr. Micah Young, Dean of Medical Sciences, informed Monroe that there were four boxes of rotting cadavers stored in an unrefrigerated closet in the James Craig Lab, and that they represented a slew of health and workplace safety violations. Within a week Young was out of a job.

Young’s lawyer, Dennis Stefanowicz, said, “He tried to do the right thing for the families and for the individuals who gave their bodies to science. When he tried to do the right thing, he ran into a brick wall, and when he brought the issue to light, instead of taking the time to figure out how the problem occurred and figure out how to right the wrong, they just terminated the person who brought the issue to light. It was the easy way out.”

Mission Creep

Monroe’s talent for taking “the easy way out” certainly came in handy within weeks of assuming the presidency at Essex County College. Monroe posted a long-winded justification for Durden’s firing — one sounding like it had been concocted in a corporate H.R. department but not an institution of higher learning:

“While the adjunct who expressed her personal views in a very public setting was in no way claiming to represent the views and beliefs of the College, and does not represent the College, her employment with us and potential impact on students required our immediate review into what seemed to have become a very contentious and divisive issue. […] In consideration of the College’s mission, and the impact that this matter has had on the College’s fulfillment of its mission, we cannot maintain an employment relationship with the adjunct. The College affirms its right to select employees who represent the institution appropriately and are aligned with our mission.”

When Durden’s case finally goes to court Monroe will have to explain precisely why violating an adjunct’s employment contract was necessary, what he thinks the college’s “mission” is, and precisely how Durden’s private opinions were incompatible with that mission. Or was it simply that Durden’s views clashed with Monroe’s corporatist views?

Black Lives Matter

But let’s not forget where this journey began — with Durden defending Black Lives Matter.

Four years ago George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. Many on the jury believed Zimmerman was guilty of murder but they were instructed that Florida’s “stand your ground” laws prevented a finding of guilt. Black Lives Matter was born out of this injustice. The murdering of black people is an important part of the BLM movement, but BLM’s statement describes it as a liberation movement with broader goals:

“Four years ago, what is now known as the Black Lives Matter Global Network began to organize. It started out as a Black-centered political will and movement building project turned chapter-based, member-led organization whose mission is to build local power and to intervene when violence is inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

In the years since, we’ve committed to struggling together and to imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive.

Black Lives Matter began as a call to action in response to state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism. Our intention from the very beginning was to connect Black people from all over the world who have a shared desire for justice to act together in their communities. The impetus for that commitment was, and still is, the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted on us by the state.”

The BLM movement foresaw that, especially after the election of Donald Trump, things were going to get ugly — and fast:

“What is true today — and has been true since the seizure of this land — is that when black people and women build power, white people become resentful. Last week, that resentment manifested itself in the election of a white supremacist to the highest office in American government.”

Newsweek cited the Trump administration’s threats:

“The president has targeted the organization, especially protesters who have taken to the streets. The White House website went live after inauguration and promised to end the ‘anti-police atmosphere’ while noting ‘our job is not to make life more comfortable for the rioter, the looter, or the violent disrupter.’ Slate wrote about this shift with the headline ‘In One of His First Acts as President, Donald Trump Put Black Lives Matter on Notice.'”

Ignorance of American History

The history lesson Durden hoped to remind America of was lost the moment Tucker Carlson heard the words “white privilege.” But the history is quite relevant to this entire story.

In 2011 historian David Blight looked at the history of Memorial Day in a New York Times piece, “Forgetting Why We Remember.”

“By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. […] Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. […] The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. […] After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway… […] The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.”

Though the impulse to honor the half-million Union and Confederate dead was expressed in many such commemorations, black Americans are very likely to have been the first to do so.

This is what Lisa Durden never got to explain to White America.

Four years ago the Massachusetts legislature considered the Massachusetts Trust Act – H.1613 and S.1135 – twin bills which placed limits on ICE but had only a handful of co-sponsors. The bill was not sent directly to hell, but it landed not that far away. This is how spineless state Democrats deal with controversy.

In the last legislative session S.1258 once again tried to protect Massachusetts refugees – and once again the bill was sent to the purgatory known as the House Rules committee. This time it had 25 Senate co-sponsors.

In the current legislative session, S.1305, the Senate version of the Safe Communities Act, has 53 co-sponsors and H.3269, the House version, has 80. Political tides are turning and many Democrats have lost patience with spineless do-nothing representatives like mine and autocratic House speakers. And to those of you (Chris Markey and Robert DeLeo) effectively collaborating with the enemy’s ICE roundups – you have turned yourselves into a list of hacks who ought to be primaried.

MIRA has a great write-up on the Safe Communities Act but in a nutshell this is it:

Massachusetts has its own laws, which must be respected. Police departments, officers, and prisons may not be federalized. The Fourth Amendment must be applied equally to all residents of the Commonwealth, regardless of status. State resources and monies are not to be used for federal purposes. Constitutionally- guaranteed rights are to apply equally to everyone in the Commonwealth. The state will not make its databases available to ICE or Homeland Security. This is the Safe Communities Act.

Progressive Massachusetts has a great script for calling your legislator.

Flood the State House with calls. Remind your representative that sending Safe Communities to purgatory will result in similar political consequences for himself.

Poor Heather Mac Donald. She didn’t get quite the reception she wanted at Claremont McKenna College (CMC) outside Los Angeles. She had come to speak on “The War on Police,” another of her frequent attacks on Black Lives Matter (BLM), and the students weren’t having it. A FOX News video shows what appear to be white allies locking arms and peacefully blocking access to the school’s Athenaeum. Mac Donald’s talk had to continue with whomever had already entered. President Hiram Chodosh live-streamed the talk and put it online. Ironically, as the media and two organizations which sponsored her talk pointed out, more people heard Mac Donald than if no protest had taken place.

Sarah Sanbar, a student fellow, introduced Mac Donald, apologized for the almost empty room, and placed the talk in its proper context. She said that Black Lives Matter opposes systemic racism and that Mac Donald was there to deny it and to paint BLM as dangerous. And that turned out to be a fairly accurate introduction.

Although Heather MacDonald is ostensibly a conservative intellectual and a “fellow” of the Manhattan Institute, she spends a lot of time on the talk show and cable television circuit. Here is Mac Donald being interviewed by Rush Limbaugh. There she is with Dennis Prager. Here she is visiting Frontpage Magazine. Mac Donald is a regular on FOX News and in virtually every far right publication. Her book on Black crime is a recommended read of the John Birch Society and the white supremacist group VDARE.

Mac Donald, who studied English and law and who is not actually a social scientist or criminologist, frequently veers into white supremacy. She believes Black communities need to be aggressively policed (occupied) to keep them safe (the White Man’s burden), and Mac Donald calls affirmative action programs “racist.” On FOX News Mac Donald and host Laura Ingraham held a pity party for white student “victims,” with Mac Donald going so far as to claim that “underprepared” blacks don’t actually want to be on these college campuses “when in fact the only reason they’re there is because the campuses want so-called diversity so much that they lower their standards.”

Such rhetoric might have had more to do with the protest at Claremont McKenna than with the pseudoscience Mac Donald tossed into her book “The War on Cops,” which Newsweek dismissed as “flawed logic and fantasy.” The Libertarian magazine Reason found Mac Donald’s logic “deficient” and took her central thesis to task: “America does not have an incarceration problem; it has a [Black] crime problem.” Police reform, prison reform, legal reform, and social reform are therefore all unnecessary because – when Mac Donald drills right down to root causes – well, the root cause is Black people.

I found it ironic that Mac Donald claims to revere the Bill of Rights while finding nothing wrong with police depriving Black teenagers of Fourth Amendment rights. She richly deserves the monicker that Black Lives Matter has given her – racist and fascist. But interfering with someone’s First Amendment rights is a problem and it’s also become an unfortunate trend. And liberal publications from the Atlantic to the LA Times and the New York Times, as well as civil liberties groups like the ACLU, have condemned such liberal intolerance.

Yet if the American Right are the true friends of the First Amendment, as they claim to be, let us see a flurry of Conservative letters to the editor defending protections for whistleblowers, journalists, rights for those boycotting Israeli occupation, support for net neutrality, and ending press bans in the White House. Let us hear fevered calls to stop restricting the right of people to demonstrate except in “free speech zones.” Let the Great Right wing rise up and repeal their own laws permitting vehicular murder of protesters (google it!). Let there be a torrent of letters demanding an end to gag orders on physicians providing women’s health services.

And let us see the nation’s editorial pages flooded with defenses of Kashiya Nwanguma, a Black woman who protested at a Trump rally and was assaulted by a white supremacist at the behest of the white supremacist candidate.

For this is what it’s really about. There’s more here than Heather Mac Donald’s First Amendment right to heap insult and advocate repression on an entire race.

Now that the entire government is doing it.

Donald Trump campaigned with a promise to deport three million people. A mass expulsion of this scale would not only be a human catastrophe but also a civil liberties nightmare and a drain on local law enforcement agencies expected to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known by the strangely appropriate acronym ICE.

As a result many cities have enacted “sanctuary” or “welcome” policies designed to keep immigrant populations safe. Most of these policies restrict cooperation with ICE in some way. However, on January 25th the Trump administration retaliated by issuing an Executive Order which cuts off federal funds to so-called “Sanctuary Cities,” a move yet to be tested in the courts.

In an ironic reversal, it now falls to Liberal states and cities to use the Constitution’s 10th Amendment (states rights) provisions to resist oppressive Executive Orders.

Closer to home, it seems only natural that New Bedford – a city known for Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a strong underground railroad during slavery, and a vibrant immigration population today – would be a Sanctuary City. But New Bedford is afraid of joining several other Massachusetts localities – Amherst, Boston, Cambridge, Hampden County, Holyoke, Lawrence, Northhampton, Somerville, and Springfield – in resisting the president’s xenophobic decrees.

But momentum and resistance is growing. There are now hundreds of Sanctuary Cities throughout the United States. In addition, there are four Sanctuary states – California, Connecticut, New Mexico, and Colorado – with varying protections for immigrants.

A malignant group with a benign name, the Center for Immigration Studies, echoes Donald Trump’s claims that immigrants are rapists and criminals. However, the facts are quite different. An article in the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s factcheck.org cites not only ICE data itself, but law enforcement officials and the results of a University of California study debunking claims like Trump’s. There is no spike in crime in cities with immigrants, and law enforcement would prefer to hear from those impacted by crime rather than drive them underground.

But Sanctuary is nothing new. In fact, it’s an ancient concept with roots in all the Abrahamic faiths.

During the Reagan years hundreds of Central Americans found refuge in Catholic churches offering protection from murderous regimes supported by Reagan Republicans. Though there was, and still is, no legal basis in the United States for a religious institution to offer asylum, the sight of armed federal agents storming a church would have been shocking. By 1987 over 440 American cities had become “sanctuary cities.”

The Catholic tradition of offering sanctuary to refugees, the persecuted, and even criminals stretches back to at least Medieval times. Even after the Catholic Church no longer ruled an empire it still offered sanctuary and it was recognized. For over a thousand years, for example, Britain recognized asylum granted by the Church.

In the Islamic tradition, Muhammad had to flee from Mecca to Medina, and the hijrah (migration) is regarded as an example of the Islamic obligation to provide protection from oppression, even to non-Muslims:

And if anyone of the disbelievers seeks your protection, then grant him protection […] and then escort him to where he will be secure. (Surah 9:6)

It might interest those who claim to be guided by scripture that the idea of Sanctuary is also found in the Old Testament.

According to one of the first stories in the Bible, after Cain murdered his brother Abel he fled to the land of Nod. There he built a city called Enoch, named after his son. Thus, according to tradition, the first human city was founded on both a crime and an act of redemption.

In another Bible passage, before the Israelites were permitted to cross the Jordan into Canaan, they were instructed to build cities of refuge (arei miklat) where those guilty of manslaughter could flee to avoid blood retribution. The cities were run by Levites who, everyone knew, would treat the new citizens and their fellow human beings fairly. Unlike the current presidency.

Today the New Sanctuary Movement is ecumenical and not even always Christian. In many communities Jewish, Quaker, Episcopal, and Unitarian congregations have joined Catholics in protecting their most vulnerable friends and neighbors – renewing not only the ancient traditions of their faiths but putting faith into practice.

Donald Trump’s Executive Orders are causing a lot of fear and insecurity in New Bedford’s immigrant community, resulting in a dramatic increase in demand for the Immigrants’ Assistance Center’s (IAC) services. Now more than ever the IAC needs your support.

* * *

The IAC will be hosting another community forum on Saturday, February 25th, 10-12am, at 58 Crapo Street in New Bedford. The purpose will be to give the immigrant community an overview of the impact of the Trump presidency. Come and learn about rights and risks.

Download the community forum flyer here.

* * *

Next month, on March 31, 2017 from 6pm-10pm, the IAC will be hosting a fundraiser at the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Harbor View Room at 18 Johnny Cake Hill, New Bedford. Tickets are $50 per person.

Download the fundraising letter here.

* * *

Don’t stop with that fundraising ticket. If you can spare the cash, support the IAC generously with a bigger donation. They are going to need more resources than any of us can imagine right now.

When Donald Trump began mixing right-wing populism with the demonization of Mexicans, Muslims, and – well, just about everybody – it brought to mind an old, reptilian strain of fascism and it revived sales of Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.” Lewis’ book shows us that fascism damn well can happen here. And, yes, that photo above is of an all-too real Nazi rally in Madison Square garden in 1939.

People have been dreading this week, and for good reason.

When the New York Times reviewed Volker Ullrich’s book “Ascent,” it was obvious that the review was not merely about Hitler’s ascent to power but about someone closer to home. Now, with real neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the White House, no one can say “It Can’t Happen Here” was just a piece of fiction.

It’s happened already.

A while ago the New Yorker ran a cartoon with an amusing caption: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, while those who do study history are doomed to stand around helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”

So recently I’ve been re-reading Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Arendt begins with the rise of antisemitism and moves on to nationalism, then to how citizens are isolated, the weak are stripped of their humanity, the average guy loses his remaining power by being subsumed into a mob, and how myth and lies become the dominant narrative. The world of “fake news” articles in Facebook streams or denying science is hardly a new one. And the complete and blitzschnell capitulation by the Republican establishment is shocking, but one that Arendt would have predicted.

Totalitarianism depends on desperation and the suspension of critical thinking – in other words, a society gone mad. Arendt writes:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Last year Republicans managed to turn serious social and economic woes afflicting all Americans into End Times for a very specific constituency. During the presidential conventions last summer, for Democrats the glass was half full – and could topped off at leisure. Yes, they said, there were problems, but the nation had made progress and we were going to make even more. But for Republicans, the glass was totally empty. And shattered. And there were shards of glass in dead babies. White, Christian babies. And Democrats were gunning for the fathers.

By studying the rise of Nazism, Arendt figured out the importance of lies, doubt, insecurity and self-delusion. Her insights still hold today.

So when Trump and his Breitbart buddies make up their own “facts,” declare war on the “lying [mainstream] press” (some of them even use the Nazi word “Lügenpresse”):

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

And when Trump speaks to white crowds and promises to make “America great again,” whitewashing national crimes, institutional racism and promoting American Exceptionalism and Christian White identity:

“The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.”

And when Trump promises: “I’m going to fix everything. Trust me.”

“The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.”

We can feel the instability beginning this week as Trump begins dismantling all the agencies that protect citizens.

* * *

And, as if he had somehow been reading Arendt himself – perhaps as a cookbook – this week the new president, his press secretary, and his apologists went to war with the press and with facts. Trump ordered media blackouts on a number of federal agencies.

Last year’s election season, with the emergence of an authoritarian candidate, got at least a couple of scholars wondering how a coup might unfold in the United States. Taziz Huq and Tom Ginzburg of the University of Chicago Law School, write:

Is the United States at risk of democratic backsliding? And would the Constitution prevent such decay? To many, the 2016 election campaign may be the immediate catalyst for these questions. But it is structural changes to the socio-economic environment and geopolitical shifts that make the question a truly pressing one. […] By drawing on comparative law and politics experience, we demonstrate that there are two modal paths of democratic decay, which we call authoritarian reversion and constitutional retrogression. A reversion is a rapid and near-complete collapse of democratic institutions. Retrogression is a more subtle, incremental erosion that happens simultaneously to three institutional predicates of democracy: competitive elections; rights of political speech and association; and the administrative and adjudicative rule of law. Over the past quarter century, we show that the risk of reversion has declined, while the risk of retrogression has spiked. The United States is not exceptional. We evaluate the danger of retrogression as clear and present, whereas we think reversion is much less likely. We further demonstrate that the constitutional safeguards against retrogression are weak. The near-term prospects of constitutional liberal democracy hence depend less on our institutions than on the qualities of political leadership and popular resistance.

We’re at risk. We’re not immune. And our now-gutted Constitution can’t help us. But while a coup may not be in the immediate future, Ginsburg says:

“We’re at this moment where it’s very good to be considering these things.

Indeed it is.

I often spend the morning reading the local paper, going online to look at mainstream and international news and commentary. Much of what I read is liberal, progressive or libertarian, but I also like (perhaps too strong a word) to see what conservatives are up to. As I’ve mentioned before, many are moving quickly from right to far right.

Recently I took a journey into an even darker corner of the conservative world – that is, the White House corner office of the president-elect’s advisor, Steve Bannon. My travel ticket was something Bannon himself published in his Breitbart News. It was a piece by Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.”

Starting with this article, I used a little low-tech programming to follow the links of its “young, creative, and eager heretics” from page to page, bookmarking their journals, websites, blogs, blogrolls and followers. What I found was that many, if not most of the “Alt-Right,” are white supremacists, more than a few are antisemites, and their ranks are filled with young men who hate women.

Welcome to the Jugend of Trump’s new Republican Party.

Despite Yiannopoulos’ false characterization of Rush Limbaugh as hostile to these Young Bavarians, actually the reverse is true – mainstream conservatives are charmed. And if you’re not convinced how dangerous these lunatics can be, one of Trump and Bannon’s buddies is planning to terrorize the Jewish residents of Whitefish, Montana about a week from now.

As the mainstream press begins the process of ingratiating itself with Trump gatekeepers and generally cozying up to extremism in general, we’re about to witness the process of normalization of the bizarre, the freakish, the obscene, and the unconstitutional. Last week my local newspaper all but endorsed prison slave labor for building Trump’s “Mexican wall.” And mainstream TV networks are hopping on board the crazy train.

So if you want the young “creative heretics” of Trump’s Great America to show you their true colors, you’ll find links to their websites here and in an annotated version here.

You’re about to encounter a lot of white sheets and brown shirts.

Mainstream-ish

We start with conservative publications often cited in other conservative publications. Although some promote fairly extreme views, it’s nothing you don’t hear in the halls of Congress (think of Rep. Steve King) or on Fox News (think – all of them). While a few publications have managed to remain realistically fiscally and moderately social conservative, most have become pretty extreme, even William F. Buckley’s National Review. This alone should scare the hell out of Americans who remember that not even Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan would say such crazy.

• American Conservative
• American Enterprise Institute
• American Interest
• American Outlook (Sagamore Institute)
• American Spectator
• American Thinker
• Ann Coulter
• Anonymous Conservative
• Bloomberg View
• Breitbart News
• Brookings Institution
• Campus Reform
• Cato Institute
• Chronicles
• City Journal
• Commentary
• Daily Mail
• Dissident Right
• Drudge Report
• Federalist
• Foundation for Economic Education
• FOX News
• Frontpage
• Globalist
• Heritage Foundation
• Ideas in Action
• Imaginative Conservative
• Independent
• Kathy Shaidle
• Laura Ingraham
• Libertarian Party
• MacLeans
• Mark Levin Show
• National Affairs
• National Interest
• National Journal Daily
• National Review
• New Criterion
• New Republic
• New York Post
• NPQ
• ParaPundit
• Pat Buchanan
• Policy Review
• Reason
• RedState
• Republican Party
• Richard Fernandez
• Roger Scruton
• Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
• Russell Kirk Center
• San Francisco Bay News
• Sean Hannity
• Taki’s Magazine
• Townhall.com
• Traditional Right
• Traditionalist Conservatism
• Washington Examiner
• Washington Times
• Weekly Standard
• WORLD
• WSJ Opinion & Reviews

Alt-Right

They imagine themselves the Naughty Boys of the Right, and they have a catchy new name, but they are nothing more than white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The only difference between these guys and their skinheaded cousins is a hairdo and a college degree. Just like Goebbels and Speer. And they’ve found their Führer.

• Alternative Right
• Alternative Right Aggregator
• Brussels Journal
• Gatestone Institute
• Isegoria
• Jim’s Blog
• Malcolm Pollack
• Mitrailleuse
• National Policy Institute
• Radix Journal
• RamZPaul
• Richard B. Spencer
• RightOn
• Secular Right
• Trigger Warning

Anti-Democratic

It is disappointing to discover that many Americans are not big supporters of democracy. Of course fifteen years of the Patriot Act hasn’t helped either. All these “Anti-Democrats” want is a dictator who will make the trains run on time and will charm them with their masculine wiles. Trump seems to really get these guys going.

• Aimless Gromar
• Anarcho-Monarchism
• Devin Helton
• Fred on Everything
• Hestia Society
• Jim Kalb
• Kill To Party
• Neoreaction Aggregator
• Neoreaction.net
• New International Outlook
• Social Matter
• Steve Sailer
• Sydney Trads
• Theden
• Throne, Altar, Liberty
• Valkyrie Politics
• West Coast Reactionaries
• Xenophobe.net

Anti-Diversity

Keeping immigrants out is Step #1 in ensuring White purity. Some of these people try to wrap their white racist pork in scientific bacon (fake immigration “science”) for an extra helping of severely un-kosher baloney. But you can see through it pretty quickly.

• American Border Patrol
• American Family Association
• American Renaissance
• British National Party
• Christliches Forum
• Diversity Chronicle
• Diversity is Chaos
• Diversity Macht Frei
• Ed West
• Federation for American Immigration Reform
• Free Republic
• Gates of Vienna
• Generation Identitaire
• Human Stupidity
• Imaginative Conservative
• Jew Among You
• Jewish Defence League Canada
• Jihad Watch
• John Birch Society
• Liberty GB
• Luke Ford
• Middle East Forum
• New English Review
• NumbersUSA
• Truth Revolt
• Victory Girls
• Washington Free Beacon

Anti-Feminist

Conservatives have never liked women all that much, between all that legislation controlling women’s bodies, and revulsion at the possibility that women might be as independent as men. But now a newer generation of misogynists is on the loose. They’re guys with views so offensive it’s understandable they can’t get dates. Which probably just makes things worse.

• Athol Kay
• D.J. Aurini
• Danger and Play
• Jack Donovan
• Judgy Bitch
• Manosphere.com
• Other McCain
• Postmodern Jesus
• Red Pill Review
• Return of Kings
• Satoshi Kanazawa
• Seductivamente Atractivo
• Thumotic
• Dalrock

Anti-Semitic

Virtually all these next groups fit into other hater categories, but they seem to have it out especially for Jews. And, no, these are not critics of Israel’s occupation or BDS activists. These are people who really do think Jews are devious space aliens from Satan’s loins, or the Holocaust is a conspiracy like the moon landing – or they’re just pissed because we won’t convert.

• 28 Sherman
• Aletho News
• Audacious Epigone
• Blogocrity
• CODOH
• Culture Wars Magazine and Fidelity Press
• Darkmoon
• Dienekes
• Exposing the Holocaust
• Fanghorn Forest
• Froude Society
• Henry Makow
• Holocaust Handbooks
• Holy War!
• Incog Man
• Institute for Historical Review
• Jew Watch News
• Kevin MacDonald
• Leo Frank Lynch Party
• National Prayer Network
• Occidental Observer
• Propertarian Forum
• ProThink
• Robert Lindsay
• Shylock Holmes
• Solar General
• Thinking Housewife
• Ugly Truth
• Veterans News Now
• Vox Day
• What Really Happened

Anti-Work

This was an interesting surprise. Some of these basement dwellers abandoned Marx’s analysis that capitalism makes profits off worker’s labor and now think it’s all a plot to denigrate them as men and write off their Nietzschean qualities. Time to redecorate the man cave. Mom? Can I borrow $20?

• Abolish Work
• Why Work?

Survivalist-Collapse

A war is coming. The Jews, the Elites, asteroids, Altoids. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that life as we know it is about to change and only the strong will survive. Sometimes this isn’t quite so dramatic – instead there’s a nostalgia for the way things once were – like when the South had slavery. God, these people are messed up.

• Anonymous Cop
• John Robb
• Less Wrong
• Modern Survivalist
• Slate Star Codex
• Southern Agrarian

White-Supremacist

By far, this was the largest group that emerged as I began accumulating links. Yessir, give the “Alt-Right” boy a proper haircut – and it turns out he’s really a skinhead.

• Al Fin
• Alain de Benoist
• American Patriot Network
• Angry White Dude
• Anomaly
• Anti-Democracy
• Anti-Matter
• Arktos Media
• Aryan Street
• Atavisionary
• Atlantic Centurion
• Attack the System
• Avenging Red Hand
• BitTube
• Bloody Shovel
• Bonald
• Cambria Will Not Yield
• Captain Capitalism
• Christopher Cantwell
• Colin Flaherty
• Council of Conservative Citizens
• Council of European Canadians
• Counter Currents
• Creativity Alliance
• Daily Kenn
• Daily Stormer
• Darwinian Reactionary
• David Duke – KKK
• De Monarchia
• Death Metal Underground
• Deconstructing Leftism
• Education Realist
• Emil Kierkegaard
• Euro-Synergies
• Evo and Proud
• EvolutionistX
• Faith and Heritage
• Follow the White Rabbit
• Frank Salter
• Free Northerner
• Garrett Hardin Society
• Garvey’s Ghost
• Genocide Report
• Guillaume Faye
• Hail to You
• Henry Dampier
• Human Biodiversity
• Human Varieties
• Jacob Holdt: Ku Klux Klan
• Kevin Alfred Strom
• League of The South
• League of the South!
• Lone Wolf – Tom Metzger
• Majority Rights
• Matt Forney
• Metapedia
• Mindweapons in Ragnarok
• National Vanguard
• Nationalist Movement
• Neoreactionary Map
• New Observer
• Nobility
• Not Politically Correct
• Occidental Dissent
• Oriental Reactionary
• Outside In
• Pan-Criollismo
• Patriactionary
• Political Cesspool
• Poseidon Awoke
• praag.org
• Propertarianism
• race/history/evolution notes
• Radical Traditionalist
• Reactionary Future
• Reactionary Thought
• Reactivity Place
• Refugee Resettlement Watch
• Resistance
• Right Drama
• Right Stuff
• Social Pathologist
• Stormfront – White Nationalist
• The Unpopular Truth
• Tomislav Sunic
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• Total Fascism
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• Tribal Theocrat
• Unz Review
• Vanguard Network News Forum
• VDARE
• West Hunter
• West’s Darkest Hour
• Western Voices World News
• White Biocentrism
• White GeNOcide Project
• White Network
• White News Now
• White Resister
• Zippy
• Zundel Site
• Renew America

Uncategorized

After a while I just couldn’t care anymore about which category they belonged in. There are just too many sociopaths and psychopaths who voted for Trump and have opinions like this:

• A House with No Child
• A Man Apart
• A Silent Sky
• Admiral Cod
• AfroTraditionalist
• Alrenous
• Amerika
• Anti-Puritan
• Bruce Charlton’s Miscellany
• Citadel Foundations
• Count Nothingface
• Darwinian Conservatism
• Death Rides a Pozzed Horse
• Dividuals
• Edward Feser
• Esoteric Traditionalist
• Eurogenes
• Ex-Army
• Face To Face
• Forward Base B
• Foseti
• Habital Worlds
• Handle’s Haus
• Hawaiian Libertarian
• hbdchick
• Heartiste
• Hurlock
• Hurlock
• I am Legionnaire
• Improprietary Influence
• Inductivist
• Information Processing
• iParallax
• Irish Monarchism
• Jayman
• Kakistocracy
• Larval Subjects
• Lawrence Glarus
• Losing the Creek
• Mad Monarchist
• Magus Janus
• Mami’s Shit
• Me In Words
• Migration Period
• Millenial Review
• Monarchist
• Neo-Ciceronian Times
• Neocolonial
• Neovictorian
• No Quarter Asked, No Quarter Given
• Nydwracu
• Occam’s Razor
• One Irradiated Watson
• Orthodox Laissez-fairist
• Orthosphere
• Oz Conservative
• PA
• Paris Hairline
• Part 2
• Pax Dickinson
• Peter Frost
• Peter Grant
• Prax Americana
• Psychological comments
• Quick Reactions
• Radical Royalist
• Radio Free New Jersey
• Radish
• Raptros
• Right Vidya
• Shitlord Hub
• Social Pathology
• Stuart Schneiderman
• Those Who Can See
• Traditionalist Blog
• Uncertain Certainty of God
• Unorthodoxy
• Unqualified Reservations
• Vanishing American
• Was Enlightened
• Wildism
• Wilson Revolution Unplugged

It has not gone unnoticed that Donald Trump’s election day shocker was due largely to support from the so-called “Alt-Right” – a catchy new euphemism for white supremacy and Hitler salutes. But less conspicuously, even “mainstream” Republicans have been cozying up to white supremacy lately. And in general, the political landscape has shifted sharply to the far right in the last two years.

Mainstream conservatives are embracing the fringe.

The National Review

The National Review, which was founded by William F. Buckley in 1955, has struggled with and repeatedly purged itself of white supremacists but seems to be losing the battle. The magazine has had to fire John Derbyshire, who had a little racist sideline on Taki’s Magazine, where Richard Spencer was once an editor; John O’Sullivan, another NR writer who was on the boards of both VDARE and the Lexington Research Institute; Peter Brimelow, NR writer and former editor at Forbes, and a writer for Barron’s, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal.

William F. Buckley devoted much of his time to weeding segregationists, “Birchers,” anti-Semites, and the lunatic fringe from the pages of the National Review. After he died in 2008 the garden he planted was overrun with weeds.

This week’s National Review, for example, has long-time NRO editor George Will defending Jeff Sessions, a KKK apologist too racist to be appointed as a federal judge but who may now be the Attorney General. Alongside this is a piece by forrmer NR editor Charles C.W. Cooke, who penned “Teach Holocaust Denial and be Proud of It.” And right next to that is a piece by Andrew C. McCarthy blasting Obama’s refusal to veto a UN resolution on illegal Israeli settlements. McCarthy is also the author of a book promoting the conspiracy theory that Obama is trying to bring Shariah law to the United States.

The Heritage Foundation+

The Heritage Foundation, whose opinion-shapers appear regularly in newspapers, has also been afflicted with the virus. Jason Richwine is the most notorious of these, penning a number of articles on blacks and Hispanics on alternativeright.com. President-elect Trump’s White House advisor Steve Bannon praised Richwine on his Sirius XM radio show. The Heritage Foundation wraps its white supremacy in “scientific studies,” like the one Richwine wrote that blasted immigration reform, claiming illegal immigrants would suck $9.4 trillion of benefits from upstanding white Americans – which one writer joked “will bankrupt the solar system.”

Besides racism, the Heritage Foundation also promotes Islamophobia. A 2014 panel the Heritage Foundation organized to draw attention to the Benghazi controversy soon devolved into a mudslinging match accusing President Obama of funding jihadist violence and promoting Shariah law. The Heritage Foundation had invited Brigitte Gabriel from ACT, which the Council on American-Islamic Relations has identifed as part of a well-funded Islamophobia Network. The panel was led by Chris Plante, a rightwing talk show host, who turned the discussion into an “Islamophobic freak show,” as Salon described it, and included Frank Gaffney, one of the fringiest of the fringe. The panel featured the trio attacking a Muslim student who rose to speak and demanding to know her nationality (it was “United States citizen”).

The Heritage Foundation’s president is Jim DeMint, a former U.S. Senator from South Carolina turned Tea Party leader, and “the most hated man in Washington” by one account. Under DeMint’s leadership the Heritage Foundation has lost credibility and clout. As Senator, DeMint was a divisive politician who went out of his way to greet a racist rally, a move that fellow Republicans slammed, with one warning that “freaks fill the void and define the party.” Call it an “unguarded moment” or a Freudian slip, but DeMint admitted that the purpose of disenfranchising blacks through Voter ID laws was to elect “more conservatives.”

It is not surprising that the Heritage Foundation was founded by Richard Mellon Scaife, who died recently. An heir to the Mellon fortune, Scaife set up a network of rightwing foundations and Islamophobic organizations. In the good old days, billionaires dabbled in art. Now they support hate groups.

(Dear newspaper editors – if you’re reading this – stop publishing garbage from the Heritage Foundation!)

Other mentions

No one could have imagined Ann Coulter’s fulminations could get any worse but now she is attending VDARE’s white supremacy conferences. We always thought Ann was just a fact-challenged provocatuese but now we know better.

The American Conservative Union, which runs the CPAC conference all Republican candidates are expected to attend, is another nexus of white supremacists and Klan admirers.

The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps tabs on all these homegrown Nazis – and it’s not like they didn’t warn us. The NAACP as well reported six years ago on the Tea Party’s deep ties to white supremacist groups and extremist militias.

Paleoconservatism and Trump

Before the Alt-Right there were the Paleoconservatives – anti-Semites and isolationist Eurocentric nationalists. Pat Buchanan, who was an advisor to both Nixon and Reagan, has written for Holocaust denying publications and cited the American Nazi Party’s William Pierce in one of his books. Over time paleoconservatives fell out of favor for their isolationism and were banished to the fringes where they became a natural magnet for the extreme right.

Stephen Mihm writing in Bloomberg News makes a good argument for Trump’s paleoconservatism. And Dylan Matthews writing in Vox suggests that Donald Trump is not merely an opportunist manipulated by the Alt-Right but an “imperfect Paleoconservative” himself. Both articles should dispel the image of Trump as a mere showman. Trump (like his father before him) has been at home in his white, white world a long time.

Sixteen years ago, William F. Buckley had this to say about the next President of the United States:

What about the aspirant who has a private vision to offer to the public and has the means, personal or contrived, to finance a campaign? In some cases, the vision isn’t merely a program to be adopted. It is a program that includes the visionary’s serving as President. Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today’s lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America. But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something. So what does Trump say? That he is a successful businessman and that that is what America needs in the Oval Office. There is some plausibility in this, though not much. The greatest deeds of American Presidents — midwifing the new republic; freeing the slaves; harnessing the energies and vision needed to win the Cold War — had little to do with a bottom line.

Today the magazine Buckley founded is nothing but a mirror for Trump to gaze at himself adoringly.

The Trump presidency is shaping up to be a temporary win for white supremacy and intolerance. No groups in America are less secure now than Muslims and immigrants – and by “immigrants” I mean people here in the United States legally. Retroactive enforcement of the draconian 1996 Immigration Reform Act makes many relatively small crimes deportable offenses – even for those here for decades.

On Saturday I attended a community forum at the Immigrants Assistance Center hosted by Helena DaSilva Hughes. The meeting was intended to calm New Bedford’s frightened immigrant community and provide insights into changes the Trump administration might make and to review immigrant rights under the law.

There were three speakers: Schuyler Pisha, Legal Director at Catholic Social Services; Rita Resende, a lawyer at Watt & Sylvia; and Marcony Almeida-Barros, of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office. Attendees learned what sort of changes the Trump administration could make on Day One; about changes to existing immigration law that are unlikely; and about changes virtually impossible because of the Bill of Rights. If anyone is interested in the details, here are my meeting notes or (if you read Portuguese) there should be an article in “O Jornal” next Friday. The Attorney General’s representative gave a brief outline of services the AG’s office provided to anyone in Massachusetts. “You have rights,” he told everyone. “And you have a state agency to help you.”

The Immigrants Assistance Center (IAC) has a surprisingly tiny budget of $350K, 10% of which consists of donations through fundraising, while the remainder comes from foundations, grants, and small contracts with the City of New Bedford. Each year the IAC, which has a staff of 8, serves about 7,000 people. It could do a lot more with your financial help.

But besides financial support, the IAC could really use your skills: – grant-writing – one or two full time ESOL (English as a Secondary Language) teachers, or four part-timers (bonus points if you speak or read Portuguese and Spanish or both)

The IAC is small but mighty. Please help them help our community.

= = =

Much has been written about the reasons for Donald Trump’s election and how Democrats can get their act together. One of the best prescriptive pieces I’ve read appeared in the Sunday Standard Times and was written by Scott Lang, who has some unique insight into the party’s machinery. I’m not sure Democrats can wait until the middle of 2018 for a new platform but Lang’s essay should kick off an honest discussion of: What Next?

Donald Trump’s last-ditch campaign manager, Steve Bannon, head of Breitbart News which has become a lounge for racists and neo-Nazis, finally got the job done. But even before Bannon, Trump had surrounded himself with Islamophobes, racists and white supremacists and he has continuously promised a Muslim Registry.

With Trump’s meeting yesterday with Peter King to discuss a Muslim surveillance program, it is now even clearer that the incoming administration intends to proceed down this slippery slope.

And who knows what’s next?

A few tech companies have said they’ll refuse to lend a willing hand on such a project, but some have not.

There is a petition to urge other tech companies to follow the lead of Twitter, Microsoft, and Facebook:

http://act.democracyforamerica.com/sign/stop_trump_registry/

And if you don’t like the idea of Bannon in the White House, sign this one too:

http://pac.petitions.moveon.org/sign/tell-trump-fire-steve

Petitions may not accomplish much – and all it takes is for one tech company to build the registry. But it’s important to speak out against all the hate that is finding a home in the new administration.

* * *

If you find these emails annoying or they’re not your thing, just click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the letter and I’ll stop hounding you. I promise.

Blame for losing the Presidential election has been leveled at Democrats for something called “identity politics.” The charges? Preoccupation with gays, blacks and women. Coddling immigrants. Too much political correctness. White Lives Matter!

A piece in the New York Times by Libertarian Mark Lilla (“The End of Identity Liberalism“) castigates liberals for celebrating diversity instead of commonality. Lilla adds that liberals wrongly attribute their loss to “whitelash” – white economic suffering turned into racist rage. He accuses liberals of waiting impatiently for “demographic extinction” of white, rural, religious Americans. Lilla often writes of what he sees as an almost tidal pull of religion on society. He notes that white rural Christians think of themselves as victims – a potent and volatile concept of identity – and he warns that, while “identity politics” may have started with the Klu Klux Klan, “those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.”

Lilla advises liberals to turn their backs on civil rights “issues that are highly charged symbolically […], especially those touching on sexuality and religion. Such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. […] America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.”

But it’s not just bathrooms. As Lilla observes, it’s every issue pitting fundamentalism against secular Americans. And not all of “America” shares LIlla’s religious views – or even his concept of what “America” is.

In “The Federalist,” a conservative journal, Rachel Lu writes that the GOP saw how successfully identity politics worked for liberals and is using it themselves. But she worries that it “has primarily been rooted in a nostalgic vision of an aging, mostly-white voting base.” She thus credits the demographic problem Lilla dismisses while agreeing with him that the GOP is playing with fire.

Kay Hymowitz, author of books on how feminism hurts men, writes in the conservative “National Review” that liberal politics exploits alliances between groups that have nothing in common except for “one source of solidarity: a common enemy known as ‘the white male.'” This is a common complaint from the White Right, and Hymowitz asks provocatively: “Now that a disaffected group of white men are claiming identity politics for themselves, will that change?”

Neoconservative Christopher Caldwell, in the New York Times (“What the Alt-Right Really Means“), addresses some of these disaffected white men – some of them neo-Nazis and white supremacists. His thesis is that the “Alt-Right,” given plenty of column inches by Trump advisor Steven Bannon at Breitbart News, is simply “practicing identity politics in the manner of blacks and Hispanics.”

But do Democrats really demonize whites in order to advantage every other group? Is Hymowitz correct that gays, Blacks, Muslims, the poor, Hispanics, disenfranchised voters, prisoners, women, Native Americans, and others have absolutely nothing in common?

Hymowitz is wrong on both counts. The “common enemy” of each group is injustice, not white men. And minorities – and whites – have plenty in common, beginning with a desire for an inclusive, tolerant nation.

The GOP is 89% white, while that number is 60% for Democrats. For decades it has been the Democratic Party that defended a variety of civil rights – abortion, voting rights, wage parity, marriage equality, privacy – rights the GOP works so tirelessly to dismantle.

Fighting for civil rights in itself is not identity politics. Neither is protecting disadvantaged constituencies or insisting that Constitutional rights apply to all – and not merely Premium Class citizens.

True, since at least Bill Clinton’s administration the Democratic Party has neglected blue collar workers – not that the GOP ever cared – but in the Trump narrative it’s only white folks whom Democrats have betrayed. This strange, even racist, GOP narrative completely Photoshops minorities out of the working class picture. In Trump’s reality show minorities are all cast as welfare queens, rioting thugs, terrorists, illegal aliens, subversives, or crybabies.

Besides maintaining their defense of civil rights, Democrats must do a better job of representing workers – which means spending less time at Davos and the Aspen Institute and more time in union halls. Go visit Wisconsin! – a state Clinton bypassed in 2016. Pay more attention to Main Street and show less breathless infatuation with Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Go back to your roots, Democrats.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign finally found the winning ticket with its third campaign manager, an anti-Semite with a soft spot for neo-Nazis. The Great new America they’ve promised is founded on a cynical and dangerous form of identity politics we haven’t seen since 1925.

That was the year the United States had 4 million members of the Ku Klux Klan.

When Donald Trump’s presidential campaign really started to take off, shocking everyone, pundits ascribed its success to White Anger. The consensus in the Liberal media was that Trump’s supporters were basically all “Abner Snopes” – William Faulkner’s angry white sharecropper, racist white trash. At the time pundits made more of Snopes’ racism than the fact that he burned down the barns of rich white men. In fact Snopes would have happily burned down both Trump Tower and the Clinton mansion in Chappaqua. Ultimately it wasn’t race that made Abner Snopes angry.

But now that Trump is the GOP candidate and shock and awe has truly set in, Liberals are still scratching their heads. The same distrust of globalization has popped up in Britain with the Brexit, and it’s only slowly dawning on Liberals that there’s much more to it than racism or xenophobia. But no matter – Democrats don’t need to address such issues head-on if Trump can be a new Hitler.

The Atlantic Monthly published a piece recently that takes another shot at understanding Donald Trump’s appeal among poor whites and their anger at the “Liberal elites” they say are largely responsible for their misery. And poor whites have a point, though the Republican Party has done nothing to help them either.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/

Liberals see the real racism of poor whites lashing out at demographic shifts and ascendant minorities. It’s not an illusion. But they also judge poor whites to be doing little to “better themselves” – a strange formulation which, if directed at people of color, would sound a lot like unvarnished racism. Yet this is a common view among many well-educated Liberals – people like you and me. In years past we told the lazy bum, “Go get a job.” Now we tell him to go get a master’s degree. This is the essence of the meritocracy: work hard and get ahead. We pat ourselves on the back that we’re not racists because both Mark Zuckerberg and Barak Obama merit our approval.

But just as Capitalists assume markets and resources are infinite, Liberals assume the capacity to replace manufacturing jobs with highly-skilled technology jobs is equally unbounded. Yet, for a multitude of reasons, not every unemployed factory worker is going to make a happy transition to web designer or CNC programmer, particularly if he’s been out of work a decade. And how do Liberal policy makers intend to deal with this fact of life? They have no solutions.

The authors of the Atlantic piece make the case that it is the neoliberalism which upper middle class whites uncritically support – people like you and me – that has created unemployment, trade imbalances, and economic disaster for the working class – and this obviously includes the white working class. Liberals – people like you and me – see ourselves, however fuzzy the image in the mirror, as part of the meritocracy – people who have gotten up early, gone to bed late, attended night school, lifted ourselves up by the boot-straps. Anyone who didn’t manage to replicate our feats of dedication, perserverance and daring is a loser. How very like Trump we really are.

Consider a recent Town Hall meeting in Elkhart, Indiana, at which President Obama patiently explained to an older Carrier air conditioning employee that there is little that we can do as a nation to help people like him when factories like his move to Mexico. Yes, people like you are affected, the President explained with characteristic eloquence, but America is moving forward with high-tech jobs in exciting new industries and training is the key. End of discussion. Go get some training.

But in what? No one in Free Market paradise has either a crystal ball or a Five Year Plan.

So there seems to be a somewhat magical view that sending people off to community college or paying for everyone to attend four year colleges will solve employment problems without any long-term economic planning or public-private training partnerships. As if there were not enough issues on its plate, Education has now become totally responsible for fixing the social problem of unemployment.

But back to Elkhart, Indiana. The older Carrier employee just stood in the aisle, a bit surprised at the President’s answer, and respectfully mute as the Chief Executive explained why the country was leaving him behind in its wake of progress. When I recounted this story to a friend of mine, she had little sympathy for the air conditioning worker. “I put myself through college. He could have done it too.”

The picture of Poor White America as lazy racist “white trash” – Abner Snopes again – is pervasive. It’s also not easy to reject completely if you’ve ever seen the Tea Party in action. But like everything in this country, the reality is always more complex. The authors of the Atlantic piece argue that we should have seen all this coming long, long ago, and they lay the blame squarely at the feet of people – like you and me – who identify as Democrats and progressives.

We created these policies. We hardened our hearts. We looked away from the misery right in our own backyards – all while saving endangered species and writing checks to truly worthy causes. We do this at a distance – like the far-off wars which Liberals regularly vote for – without once seeing the real human costs. And we do this from our perch of superiority and entitlement.

But here is how Trump’s supporters see it in the small towns where jobs are long gone:

“The demoralizing effect of decay enveloping the place you live cannot be underestimated. And the bitterness – the “primal scorn” – that Donald Trump has tapped into among white Americans in struggling areas is aimed not just at those of foreign extraction. It is directed toward fellow countrymen who have become foreigners of a different sort, looking down on the natives, if they bother to look at all.”

And we do this to everyone, not just Poor White America.

Earlier in the year the Atlantic ran another piece on the white working class. Again, the takeaway from this article was that it’s the upper middle class – shrinking by the second – that has transmuted into a meritocracy of college graduates for whom advanced degrees are almost a necessity, who receive the majority of high-paying jobs and leave the rest of America behind:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-working-class-poverty/424341/

The idea of a meritocracy is hardly new, but those who merit have shrunk to a kernel consisting mainly of the white upper middle-class. Though meritocracy seems almost an article of American faith, both Conservatives and Progressives now increasingly see it as a sham, a cruel lie that masks the fact that the true predictor of success in America is your father’s wealth. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal sees it:

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/12/american-meritocracy-isnt-what-it-used-to-be-in-five-charts/

But don’t say that to a Liberal Democrat.

Democrats are no less rigid or doctrinaire than their Republican brethren. Few who regard themselves as straight-ticket Democrats want to confront the party’s neoliberalism – globalism, trade, the “meritocracy.” Liberals are shocked that a whole new generation of voters hasn’t accepted this article of faith and is holding out for a different kind of America. It was unthinkable that 46% of the Democratic Party membership in Philadelphia actually meant what they said about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And, anyway, they weren’t really Democrats.

But rather than examining what neoliberalsm has actually wrought, Democrats have taken a lazy, even dishonest tack – distracting voters with external threats. A piece in “Overland,” a progressive Australian journal, describes the shameful strategy of presenting Trump as little more than a fascist:

Trump, fascism, Putin and Wikileaks: the anatomy of a liberal nervous breakdown

The basic point of the article is that – without any firm identity or an understanding of who it actually serves – the Democratic party’s survival depends mainly on frightening the bejesus out of members and voters alike. The DNC stands for nothing this year – only against a manufactured threat of “fascism.”

The author of the Overland piece quotes Thomas Frank’s thesis, which is developed in his book “Listen, Liberal:”

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30325613-listen-liberal

Diane Ravich summarizes it this way:

In recent years, the Democrats have been consistently liberal on social issues, but indistinguishable from the Republicans on economic issues. They are as likely to be as hostile to unions as Republicans. Their unabashed support for free trade hurt the working class and exported the manufacturing sector. America used to be a country where a person without a college degree could get a good job, but now a college degree is priced beyond the reach of low-income and even middle-income students.

What happened to the Democrats? He says that they have been blinded by their Ivy League pedigrees, and they surround themselves with people just like themselves. Their class interests blind them to the needs of working-class Americans. They do not hear from people outside their social and economic class. He takes Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as examples of people who were plucked from obscurity and turned into superstars and came to believe that meritocracy would solve the nation’s problems. They were wrong. Meritocracy served to put them out of touch and to insulate them from different points of view.

Bill Moyers interivewed Franks as well:

http://billmoyers.com/story/author-thomas-frank-talks-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-and-his-new-book-listen-liberal/

Democrats can no longer claim to be the party of the people. As Franks argues, we – people like you and me – have become neither fish nor fowl – neither “the people” nor the oligarchic 1% that owns and runs the country. Liberals have become almost a separate class, lost and confused about their true identity and unreliable in their allegiances. We are really nothing but the pampered accountants, fixers, and middle management for the 1%. And if you’ve ever listened to Phil Ochs’ “Love me, I’m a Liberal,” it’s been this way longer than any of us can remember.

There has been a lot of speculation and an enormous amount of nonsense written about the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) agreement. The main reason is that few people really know much about the agreement since it was negotiated in secret and the public (even our legislators) were not privy to its provisions.

This alone should be reason #1 for rejecting it, but it has its supporters.

Big Business loves it. Manufacturers love it. Wall Street loves it.

But environmentalists see red flags and the words “global warming” appear nowhere in the document. The Electronic Freedom Foundation finds privacy concerns and troubling intellectual propery language. Unions recognize its anti-worker and union-busting provisions.

Hillary Clinton loves it – though during the primaries she said otherwise. Now she and her running mate love it again. Bernie Sanders opposed it. The Green Party opposes it. The (former Republican) Libertarian candidates support it.

Donald Trump hates it, while the rest of the GOP loves it. But anything that issues from Donald Trump’s mouth must be motivated purely out of xenophobic hate-mongering – so the TPP must really be a good thing. Right?

Wrong. On this one thing Trump’s right. Read the leaked draft of the TPP yourself and click on the top links to display the annotations by environmental, privacy, and worker’s rights lawyers.

http://www.readthetpp.com/

Here is summary of some of the TPP’s more troubling provisions:

• Chapter 9 (corporate-appointed judges replace national law)

• Chapter 11 (corporations can block national regulations, including financial regulations)

• Chapter 12 (short-circuiting of immigration regulations)

• Chapter 13 (nations give up their rights to control and regulate telecommunications markets, voiding national control over data protection laws – for example, Germany with its strong data privacy laws)

• Chapter 14 (inadequate provisions for protecting personal information transmitted via electronic commerce)

• Chapter 15 (eliminates provisions allowing states to protect local jobs or address local environmental concerns)

• Chapter 17 (permits state-owned enterprises to maintain price-fixing and dumping, preventing the U.S. from challenging such market manipulations)

• Chapter 18 (overrides domestic laws protecting public health, nutrition, and socio-economic development)

• Chapter 19 (does nothing to address wage inequity or slave wages, blocks corporate exploitation of public-sector or unionized workers, blocks economic penalties for violations of human rights, anti-gay, or racist discrimination)

• Chapter 20 (“climate change” does not appear anywhere in this chapter on the environment, blocks environmental laws that create “restrictions on trade”)

• Chapter 24 (blocks small businesses from seeking certain types of “recourse to dispute settlement”)

• Chapter 27 (a commission can change the TPP agreement at will – without Congressional approval or public overview – i.e, just like the TPP was crafted in the first place)

Donald Trump’s habit of quoting Mussolini and praising Putin, Saddam, and even Kim Jong Un has been duly noted. The racist and xenophobic nature of the Tea Party faction, which has now consumed the Republican Party and anointed Trump as its mouthpiece, has been well-studied and documented. The F-word (fascism) has been mentioned many times when discussing the Trump phenomenon. Even members of his own party say he is a fascist.

But it wasn’t until Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last night that I realized how much Trump seems to consciously emulate fascist rhetoric. Last night he was selling American nationalism, pride, and strength by demonizing others – and doing it in an eerily familiar way. His wife isn’t the only one in the family to lift themes from others’ speeches: Trump’s remarks could easily have been lifted from an Austrian fascist who delivered a pre-election appeal to das Volk on July 15, 1932.

The fascist’s speech began with a litany of complaints about the degradation of the German people and its fall from greatness. The Liberals, he said, had had “more than thirteen years to be tested and proven” and turn things around. But they had failed the nation, delivering only propaganda and lies. “The German peasant is impoverished; the middle class is ruined; the social hopes of many millions of people are destroyed.” There was not a single economic sector doing well in 1932, he claimed.

“The worst thing,” he continued, “is the distruction of the trust in our Volk, the elimination of all hope and confidence.” In thirteen years all the liberals had succeeded in doing was polarizing the country. “They have played people against each other; the city against the country; the service worker against the civil servant, the manual laborer against the office worker.”

“Now, thirteen years later, after they have destroyed everything in Germany, the time has finally come for their own removal,” he warned.

What the nation needed now was economic policy fused with nationalism.

Germany First.

“As long as Nationalism and Socialism march as separate ideas, they will be defeated by the united forces of their opponents.”

And who would save the nation?

He would. of course. He would be the great unifier, giving Germans their first hint of the man’s megalomania and narcissism. He went on to proudly cite the number of his supporters:

“With seven men I began this task of German unification thirteen years ago, and today over thirteen million are standing in our ranks. […] Thirteen million people of all professions and ranks – thirteen million workers, peasants, and intellectuals; thirteen million Catholics and Protestants…”

And he would have the last laugh at those who doubted him, opposed him.

“Thirteen years ago we […] were mocked and derided – today our opponents’ laughter has turned to tears!”

And now for The Close. He was selling himself – by promising honor and greatness.

“The Almighty, Who has allowed us in the past to rise from seven men to thirteen million in thirteen years, will further allow these thirteen million to become a German Volk. It is in this Volk that we believe, for this Volk that we fight; and if necessary, it is to this Volk that we are willing […] to commit ourselves body and soul.”

“If the nation does its duty, then the day will come which restores to us: one Reich in honor and freedom…”

And – well, you probably know the rest of the story.

This election has reinforced an important truth about political candidates – that the bar is always lower for unqualified white men than it is for equally unqualified white women or men of color.

I am of course speaking of Donald Trump – and not merely of Trump, but of Rick Perry, Dan Quayle, and a long line of Good Ole Boys and Ivy League frat boys with foot-in-mouth disease, whose style is to speak first, think later – if they bother to think at all.

But let a woman try this approach and she’s a ditz or a bimbo. If she has an acerbic manner – well, she’s a bitch. In Sarah Palin’s case, the unqualified woman was quickly exiled to her porch to imagine her Russian neighbors. In Carly Fiorina’s case, her professional incompetence as HP CEO was an issue, while the male candidate who defrauded many with his fake university and who has declared bankruptcy numerous times gets a free pass.

If you are running for the Presidency while being a person of color, God help you. Every gaffe and error is offered up as proof of your genetic unsuitability for the office. Just ask Ben Carson or Herman Cain. Like Trump, Cain had women problems, but somehow Trump’s three divorces, his womanizing, his misogyny, and his ex-wife’s accusations of rape don’t really matter. Or ask Bobby Jindal, the son of Punjabi immigrants. Although what comes out of both Jindal’s and Trump’s mouths sounds much the same, it’s Jindal who is the buffoon, not Trump.

Yes, a lower bar for white men has always been a feature of American life.

Recently the rightwing commentator Patrick Buchanan wrote a piece for Townhall.com entitled “The Great White Hope.” Buchanan whines that white men are no longer respected as leaders and contributors to society. Now, he sobs, white men are seen only as the fathers of colonialism and slavery. I’m not sure how he can wave away fact as we begin to take a long, hard look in the mirror of history – and Buchanan’s case is overstated – but he writes that much is riding on Trump, a hero to millions of white men angry at the changes in society wrought by now “privileged” brown people and forced to give up their Confederate flags.

Writer Lyz Lenz reminds us that they have always been with us, these angry white men. William Faulkner’s “Abner Snopes” (from “Barn Burning,” 1939) is a beaten-down sharecropper who burns down the barns of wealthy men, and rails at rich whites and poor blacks alike. Snopes is precisely the man Buchanan is talking about – although, truthfully, Snopes would sooner burn down Trump’s tower than vote for him.

In Buchanan’s fairytale America, historical oppressors have now become the victims, the historical victims the new oppressors. Where once a white man could readily find employment because of his skin color or his connections, now that same white man is competing with Asians and Mexicans in a global marketplace. I suppose we could lay some of the blame for this at the feet of the white male titans of Capitalism.

But – no. Blame it on the Mexicans.

Which brings us right back to Trump.

Trump’s campaign has accused Clinton of playing the “gender card.” Leaving aside his remarks on Megan Kelly and others, Trump’s own campaign doesn’t do much to dispel the truth of his misogyny and racism. According to a June 4th piece in the Boston Globe by Matt Viser, Trump pays his male campaign workers a third more than women and only 9% of them are minorities. Clinton, in contrast, pays her staff equally and 33% of them are minorities. Whatever you think of her, this says something about her willingness to be everyone’s president.

This election is really a referendum on White Male privilege. Forget Clinton’s email server. Put aside for a moment her lucrative speeches on Wall Street with their guarded transcripts, and all the revolving doors that have brought the Clinton Foundation a half billion dollars. Trump’s supporters simply hate Hillary Clinton for being smarter, more experienced, and more inclined to level the playing field for women and people of color.

Office Hours

April 16, 2016

After a performance of A.R. Gurney’s Office Hours, there was a discussion which ended up defending the preservation of a Eurocentric curriculum based on the Great Books. To which I may have said something like “Western Civilization is greatly overrated.” This no doubt annoyed one person enough to write me an email – to which I replied:

Dear —

I apologize to you, and to everyone else gathered, for my cranky response to your persistent efforts to defend Western Civilization from savages, enemies of enlightenment – or, frankly, anyone outside the Judeo-Christian realm. I especially must apologize to X. I did not intend to denigrate his characterization of the noble impulses of those who founded this nation. I meant only to observe that what they actually created turned out to be, unsurprisingly, not so noble given the models they chose.

Having begun my childhood in India right after independence, I had a front row seat to a side of Western colonialism we don’t see much, fundamentalist missionary Christianity, the subjugation of other people by militarism, eugenics, racism, and the unrestrained greed for other peoples’ resources. It was clear enough as a child that something was profoundly wrong with the Great White World, and it has become even clearer as an adult.

But all this, to paraphrase Kipling, was “justified” because “our” [Western] values were superior to theirs. All this, to paraphrase the Desert Storm general Jerry Boykin, was justified because our god was stronger than their god. All this, to paraphrase the American eugenists who preceded Hitler, was justified because we are genetically fitter than the savages.

Western Civilization is the White Man’s Burden. Some of you think of it lovingly as a curriculum. The rest of the world sees it as a sledgehammer.

Even though I grew up hearing (of the Chinese) that “life is cheap in the East,” it actually turns out that the reverse is true. “We” were the only ones to have ever dropped The Bomb on humans – but, no matter, they were just Asians. “We” in the West are not ashamed to kill – in vast numbers – for money, ideology, or simply because we just don’t like you. Total up all the victims of all our wars of choice combined – they far exceed the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. And just look at our Western legacy of slavery, racism, and exploitation of the poor. Boil down all the cultural relics we have stolen or embraced – and it is little more than justification for violence perpetrated by supermen.

These are our real values, not the glowing words on a page.

We may laugh at Nietzsche’s philosophy, which express our secret values most explicitly, but any objective evaluation of our “Western” curriculum must conclude that this is a warped, ideological education that leads, paradoxically, to violence and immorality – no less than ISIS’ twisted version of Islam.

It has always struck me as incredibly strange that a Western world that embraces such violence and hatred for the weak and the “other” would also embrace a religion of peace and egalitarianism. Even if the Romans had not killed Christ and blamed it on the Jews, I think they would have had to kill him some other way. You just can’t have a guy like that running around espousing kindness and care for the poor and the weak.

The truth that the Spanish, English, Portuguese, Belgian, and American missionaries who came hand-in-hand with their colonizing forces know is this: Christianity is for the defeated. Conquerors always come with Bible in one hand and sword in another. It is always all about power: morality has little to do with it.

Indeed, the pre-millennial post-apocalyptic Christ riding in on his horse with bloodied sword is more to the liking of many Christians today. And where did they learn this version of their religion? From university graduates of the 19th Century with their classical Eurocentric educations.

And this is why I say: Western Civilization is greatly overrated.

James Baldwin observed that Americans are the only people on earth who need to “find themselves.” Baldwin was probably not the first to make this observation but his point is well taken. In the absence of communitarian values we are all on our own, suspicious of and pitted against the other guy, and we have a pretty low tolerance for anyone else’s values. Social Darwinism is our creed. The poor are weak, and the rich get what they deserve. Might is right, and nice guys finish last. A sucker is born every minute, and none of us want to be that sucker. Kindness is weakness, and altruism is suspect. Donald Trump’s genius is that he recognizes all this.

Many American Christians prefer the more muscular Old Testament to the effeminate Gospel of Jesus, and we American Jews have long forgotten what it is to be a stranger in a strange land. Truth be told, many Americans would rather worship at the feet of Ayn Rand than in the pews of traditional religions which, inconveniently, all exhort us to care for orphans and the poor. Turning the other cheek is much less in our nature than smiting the sinner by rock or sword – or at least sticking them in stocks and pillory – or social networking equivalent. In order to smite as many sinners as possible, we have the most savage armory of weapons on the planet, and we are the only nation to unleash the power of the atom on fellow human beings.

We are experiencing a particularly vicious resurgence of racism and nativism in this country. Police murders of Black people are pandemic, and Republican candidates unabashedly make racist proposals. If we look carefully, the GOP’s minor candidates are guilty of even worse than the front-runner. Scott Walker is unsure if we need to build a wall to keep out Canadians, and Chris Christie wants to track Latinos like FedEx packages. You can’t make this stuff up.

None of this should be a surprise. In 1936 the Union Party ran William Lemke alongside Roosevelt and Landon. The party was formed by the infamous Charles E. Coughlin, Gerald L.K. Smith (an associate of Huey Long), Lemke, and F.E. Townsend. Coughlin and Smith were priest and preacher, respectively, the others populists from states with poor, uneducated citizens. Besides their virulent anti-communism, cafeteria Christianity, open racism and Antisemitism, all had a fear of foreigners and a hatred of intellectuals. Although the party dissolved three years later, their political descendants have since found a home in the various brown shirted Tea Parties which now dominate the GOP.

Before that there was the Red Scare, obsessed with Jews newly arrived from Europe. Before that, the fear of anarchists – again with its bald Antisemitism. And before that, the Know Nothings, an anti-Catholic political party with no sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of Irish potato famine victims coming to America to survive. Not surprisingly, they also supported slavery. In the 1857 Dred Scott decision Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that Blacks, free or enslaved, could not automatically be granted citizenship. No anchor babies! And before that – our Original Sin, slavery itself, and Jim Crow, and institutionalized racism, and xenophobia, and all the other forms of madness we have perfected.

In 1989 San Francisco enacted a “City and County of Refuge” ordinance which prevented city employees from aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unless there was a warrant or federal law required it. Republicans have twisted the ordinance to mean that the city knowingly harbors foreign killers. Interestingly, the Book of Leviticus – which every fundamentalist Republican should have memorized by now – mandates cities of refuge for shielding murderers from blood retribution. To the west the cities of Golan, Ramoth, and Bosor, and to the east of the Jordan River the cities of Kedesh, Shechem, and Hebron were to be sanctuary cities. Today Hebron is filled with violent settlers (many “illegals” from America), darlings of a GOP which applauds Israel’s “Right of Return” law, permitting Europeans and Americans to settle in the West Bank, but doesn’t see the irony of denying similar privileges to those whose ancestors once lived in the third of Mexico that the United States seized in 1848.

The America of today has too much blood on its hands and hate in its heart for any citizen to truly “find himself.” We are at so many intersections – technology, environment, income equality, race, militarism. And we blow through every red and yellow light – always in a hurry to go nowhere, always taking the wrong turn.

This was published in the Standard Times on September 3, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150903/opinion/150909797

More than 20 states have introduced prohibitions against “foreign” (code for “Muslim”) religious laws which would not only ban Islamic “shariah law” but Jewish halacha and (surely unintended) Catholic Canon law as well: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

But when it comes to promoting Christian shariah, many of these same states are anything but shy.

Indiana’s recent passage of the so-called RFRA (“Religious Freedom Restoration Act”) was the predictable result of two jaw-dropping Supreme Court rulings. The “Hobby Lobby” ruling added religious personhood to the corporate personhood that “Citizens United” conjured up. In so doing, we now live in an alternate reality in which real religious discrimination is enshrined in law and other types of bigotry are legally sanctioned for largely Christian “religious corporations” like Hobby Lobby, owned by billionaire David Green.

Besides Indiana, Arkansas has also passed RFRA legislation. In Georgia and North Carolina similar legislation is pending. According to the New York Times, a dozen other states have some form of laws which give Christians a free pass to act in very un-Jesus-like ways.

This is nuts. We need to go back and read the U.S. Constitution again. We already have religious freedoms here. Who would claim that Christians are still fearfully huddling in catacombs? People can do whatever they want in their churches and homes. And they do – thanks to our Bill of Rights, which is perfectly adequate. If we desperately need to protect any vital, lost liberty, I suggest we restore the Fourth Amendment. That’s one that’s truly under attack.

It is the state, not a religious institution, which has an obligation to protect new families created by marriage and any children that issue from them. States need to firmly reclaim marriage as a purely civil act with legal consequences, like registering your dog or your boat. The rest is purely ceremonial. And states need to take on all forms of corporate bigotry using all means at their disposal.

So here’s what I suggest for both marriage licenses and documents of incorporation.

Go ahead and get married with a preacher who hates gays if you are so inclined. Call it a sacrament. Call it anything you want. But your marriage will simply be a private matter as far as the state is concerned. You can have a minister, a priest, a rabbi, a philosopher, your therapist, or a trapeze artist conduct your chosen rites. The state, on the other hand, requires your marriage be registered in city hall. That’s it. You’re instantly married. No one other than a state or municipal clerk will have any standing to register the marriage. Ministers lose quasi-legal marrying privileges, although they obviously continue to officiate at congregant’s weddings.

If you have a company that (like convicts and philandering politicians) has suddenly found religion, remember: your corporation exists thanks to documents of incorporation and permits issued by the state. Your company, whose ostensible purpose is to serve the public, operates at the pleasure of the state. If you and your company discriminate against even one person in the state, your corporate license should be immediately revoked. You don’t want to serve cake to gays? Fine. Make cake for your church and stop calling yourself a baker. Don’t want to sell condoms in your drug store? Fine. Choose another profession more suited to your rigid beliefs. No one is stopping you from selling to the public except yourself.

This was published in the Standard Times on April 7, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150407/opinion/150409566

A little fact-checking would have prevented Frank Medeiros from publicly embarrassing himself with a letter copied almost verbatim from a piece written by Jerry Schaefer in the Las Vegas Tribune three days before: http://lasvegastribune.net/police-officers-killed-fund/

True author aside, whoever wrote it sure did a lot of cherry-picking of police killings, yet still managed to get things wrong. His/their contention, that anyone who objects to police shooting unarmed black men is a racist … is, charitably, disorganized thinking. Or, less charitably, racism trying to defend itself.

Referring to the killing of officer Melvin Santiago, Medeiros and/or Schaefer ask why Atty. General Holder didn’t weigh in on the officer’s death. Perhaps it was because President Obama had already sent condolences to Santiago’s parents, as had Senator Cory Booker.

Medeiros asks, “How about Officer Jeffrey Westerfield?” Good question. This was not merely a case of Bad Black Man kills Good White Officer. It was a domestic abuse case gone terribly wrong, in which the killer’s half-brother did not hesitate to implicate him. Westerfield was not killed because he was white, and his killer was not arrested without help from the black community.

Medeiros and/or Schaefer also chose Kevin Jordan, a black officer who was killed by a white man, Michael Bowman. The author(s) ask why there was little public outrage. Perhaps because an officer was killed while working at a Waffle House by a gang of white thugs with legal gun permits. A better question would have been why so many people in the United States are carrying weapons into Waffle Houses.

Yet the real issue is and always has been how communities are policed.

In 2012 88% of all officers were male, with percentages over 92% in most small towns and cities. Nationally, between 70-80% of police officers are white, again with higher percentages in small towns. But cities are a huge problem. The New York Times recently ran a piece about police departments whose white officers exceed the overall white population by 30-50%. In the greater Boston area, Chelsea is 25% white but has 78% white officers – 53% higher. Dozens of Massachusetts cities have this problem and almost every major city has even worse figures than greater Boston. Ferguson, Missouri is absolutely the national norm.

Worse, these predominantly white police departments police black communities with very little accountability – and they kill on average one black man every 28 hours – so, yes, it does bring out the protests and occasionally a riot. It is impunity that has people so upset.

Statistics demonstrate that white officers are suspicious more, stop more, harass more, and shoot more when those they interact with are not white. All this increases distrust and resentment of the police. The status quo is not working.

We also cannot disregard the fact that Americans are one of the most heavily-armed people on earth. Put weapons in the hands of gangs and thugs – or even an angry boyfriend – and murders happen – to civilians and police officers alike.

According to the FBI’s figures on 48 killings of police officers in 2012, 42 officers were white and 6 were black – pretty much in line with police demographics. Medeiros and/or Schaefer imply, first, from their examples, that blacks are more likely to attack white police officers and, second, that the Sharptons and Jacksons and Obamas and Holders (translation: black people) only care when black blood is spilled. But as we have seen, both claims are nonsense.

The school-to-prison pipeline – a system that still uses “broken-windows” policing (coming down hard on minor crime) – results in one in three minority men being incarcerated sometime in his life. It is a system that prevents people from ever finding work again, denies them the vote, and fosters a cycle of anger, hopelessness, alienation, violence and more crime. Michelle Alexander, the author of the “New Jim Crow,” notes that more men are incarcerated today than under slavery.

We certainly need economic justice in this country, but we also need police departments that reflect the communities they work in and that treat everyone equally. We have a long way to go.

But to paint these calls for change in community policing as a sort of “reverse racism” is another right-wing “blame the victim” tactic. And as such it’s deeply, offensively, racist.

This was published in the Standard Times on September 18, 2014
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20140918/opinion/409180349

This spring will be the 27th anniversary of the shooting of Larry Flynt. As they have each year since March 6th, 1978, millions of Americans will take to the streets, carrying banners that read, “You can paralyze a man but not an entire nation” and “I am Larry Flynt,” arm in arm, some crying softly, all silently remembering the day that Western democracy suffered its greatest test in decades. European heads of state will join arms with their American counterparts to defend the West’s battered secular freedoms from those who would end it with more bullets.

This is more-or-less the Charlie Hebdo fable as presented by the mainstream press.

But when an Evangelical Christian named Joseph Paul Franklin (who just happened to be a Nazi, a member of the Ku Klux Klan and insane to boot) finally copped to the crime, his complaint was familiar: Larry Flynt’s Hustler Magazine had run an offensive picture of an interracial couple. Flynt and his lawyer, Gene Reeves, Jr. were then ambushed by Franklin with a sniper rifle. Flynt’s intestines were blown out and he was paralyzed. Franklin had also tried to kill Vernon Jordan, Jr., and was trying to start a race war.

Yet nobody made a big deal of Franklin’s religion or asked: Where are all the moderate Christians? Instead, rather than react with revulsion, many Americans actually felt that killing someone like Flynt would have been no great loss. What Franklin had done was lost in the wash along with his satin robes and his dog-eared Bible.

Courts and communities have never looked kindly on Mr. Flynt’s publications and he has been charged countless times with obscenity and pornography. For his part, Mr. Flynt has some very uncharitable things to say about journalistic freedom and justice in America, and that includes the Supreme Court. Unfortunately you’ll have to check Wikipedia for what he said about SCOTUS since this is a family newspaper (Mais sacrebleu! Même les journaux américains sont censurés!). Which is to say, yes, even this column is censored.

The point is that no one in the West really defends tasteless garbage masquerading as journalism – unless it happens to be something that, predictably and deliberately, will offend another culture. And not just any culture but one we hate, Islam. Judeo-Christian culture has its protections. In some European countries cartoons and articles perceived to be anti-Semitic are actually illegal. One of Charlie Hebdo’s writers was fired for such a piece, which alone calls into question the “je suis” propaganda. In the U.S. we have no such laws but we know that newspaper editors have been called on the carpet or have been pressured to issue apologies, such as when the Standard Times ran a Pat Oliphant cartoon of a goose-stepping Israeli soldier right after one of the Gaza invasions.

Zut alors! If we’re Charlie Hebdo, then maybe we should also be Larry Flynt or Pat Oliphant.

But we’re not. We have no such absolute, high-minded support for journalists and their profession. Au contraire, mon ami, we are a nation that has actually begun hounding and prosecuting journalists for doing their job. Just ask James Risen, among others.

The real issue is not the depiction of a prophet or assaults on journalistic freedom. The real issue is the West’s hubris – its perceived “right” to denigrate the rest of the world, initiate “regime change” any time of its choosing, its “right” to foist austerity programs on “lesser” nations, its “right” to choose who shall have nuclear weapons and who shall not, and its “right” to maintain military control throughout the world along with colonial era privileges in the Security Council. These are all political issues, and the young Western-educated terrorists who seethe with political insult more than they do with outrage at the depiction of the Prophet know much more about “our” politics than they do about “their” Quran or hadiths. They are easily deceived into battle, just as we are.

We do our best to convince ourselves that the anger that terrorist attacks represent comes out of nowhere, out of unknowable religious fanaticism, out of the complete rejection of democratic values by people who want to roll the clock back a thousand years. But the manifestos and communiques we’ve heard over the years are strongly political in nature – we just don’t want to hear of it. And so we dumbly ask: Why do they hate us so? – almost rhetorically, as if no real answer could possibly exist. Yet if we are really interested in ending terrorism, we need to face the real answer to this question.

And this involves looking in the mirror.

The Standard Times has been airing a lot of attacks on so-called “political correctness” lately – so many that it might momentarily be confused with Fox News.

There are certainly gradations in “PC” sensitivities, and without a doubt some are petty. But when someone launches a vicious attack on others, it is hardly “PC” to be offended or to even turn off the spigot of hate.

Today’s political cartoon shows Arts & Entertainment channel “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson with duct tape over his mouth, ostensibly the latest innocent victim of a repressive climate in which “no politically incorrect speech is allowed.”

Well, not exactly.

Robertson did not utter an essentially harmless remark, or one that people of a certain age might carelessly drop. Here’s what he – wouldn’t you know it, also a do-it-yourself preacher at Berean Bible Church in Pennsylvania – actually said about gays, mixing his own weird theology with his own weird politics:

“They received in themselves the due penalty for their perversions. They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil. That’s what you have 235 years, roughly, after your forefathers founded the country.”

And in an interview in next month’s GQ magazine, Robertson maintains that Blacks were happy, singing, and god-fearing in Jim Crow Louisiana – before the government messed it all up. The NAACP disagrees.

Rightly, A&E felt that many (possibly a majority?) of their viewers might be offended and they shut the bigot down. Making such remarks is something that Robertson should probably have done in his private Bubba World and not on national television. Didn’t his Mama tell him that’s what you get when you throw your own weird views on sex, religion and politics into an already tasteless reality show?

Further down the editorial page we have Bob Comeau whining about the harmlessness of Fox News telling the world that Santa is White. Comeau wants to sweep the Fox News anchor’s idiocy under the rug with “Skin color, in both cases, is totally irrelevant.”

But skin color is not irrelevant. Just ask Christopher Rougier, an “uppity” Black 9th grader who had the nerve to dress like Santa and was rebuked by a teacher at Cleveland High School in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. This was a child affected by the supposedly “harmless” transmogrification of Santa into an Aryan icon. Comeau would have us believe that Fox News anchor Meghan Kelly’s remarks about Santa were simply ill-conceived humor, but then she doubled down on her inanity by insisting that Jesus was White too.

Much of the Christmas Nativity story has to do with miracles. For my money, the greatest miracle is that White America clings to the notion that a guy from present-day Palestine and another from present-day Turkey look like rosy-cheeked Bavarians. To point this nonsense out is a war on Christmas – White Christmas.

I would agree with Jack Rosen, whose own anti-PC letter to the editor was published a week ago, that people secure in their own traditions should not have a problem with Christmas. But, then again, here in Massachusetts we live in an island of greater civility within a nation populated with many Robertsons and Kellys. These racists and homophobes think they can let any verbal sewage leak from their mouths without consequence. Then, when called to account, their hate speech turns out to be “just a joke” and those who find it offensive are simply “hypersensitive.”

Well, perhaps one day, when they let up a bit, we won’t be so sensitive.

In the wake of this week’s election, Republicans have decided that they weren’t paying enough attention to Hispanic voters, and now they’re going to change all that. In his editorial “The Way Forward,” far-right columnist Charles Krauthammer writes: “The principal reason [Latinos] go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants.” A few paragraphs later he proposes that, by moving immigration reform ahead and advancing Latino candidates, Republicans can “counter [Democratic appeal] in one stroke by fixing the Latino problem.”

This is a simplistic if not paternalistic view, similar to the one Republicans have about Jews who, in their minds, are supposedly devoted to a single issue: Israel. But the recent election proved to be a wake-up call for Republican (and Israeli Likud supporter) Sheldon Adelson who put hundreds of millions of dollars into uber-Zionist candidates, seeing practically every one of them lose. Meanwhile, JStreet’s PAC provided political money and cover for more moderate, less Likud-oriented, Middle East policies – and all 49 of their candidates won. In Florida, where Adelson and the Republican Jewish Caucus and others attacked President Obama on Israel, the strategy actually backfired. 27% of Florida Jews said the ads made them more likely to vote for the President.

So if Republicans plan to use the same strategy on Hispanic voters, they may be in for a wild ride.

I will leave it to Latinos to speak for themselves, but I’m guessing that years of discrimination, working for social justice, and caring for one another are not unique to any one minority group in this nation, and no matter how much Spanish is heard at the next Republican convention, Latinos will remember who their friends have been. And let’s not forget that the Republicans have had their Herman Cains, Allen Wests and Mia Loves, but a sprinkling of Black faces has not and will not alter a party unwilling to part with its extremist values. Krauthammer says as much: “Ignore the trimmers. There’s no need for radical change… Do not […] abandon the party’s philosophical anchor” – an anchor that promises only: I got mine; you’re on your own.

The original mission of the Southern Poverty Law Center (splcenter.org) was to track hate groups and violent extremists, mainly Southern white supremacists. Last year it still counted 1,018 such groups – but they were distributed all over the United States. In 2010 the FBI reported that violent attacks against Muslims had increased by 50% in just one year. Mosques have been burned – sometimes repeatedly, people murdered, beaten, and stabbed. The recent mass murder by a neo-Nazi in a Sikh temple highlights the fact that those who hate the most are among the least informed.

Which brings us to Wayne Atkinson’s piece, “Islam and Christianity contrasted” (September 25^th). His piece was less a promised “contrast” than simply a recitation of talking points from the usual Muslim-bashing hate groups, many of whom were once in the Jew-bashing business but have now diversified.

Last week in France, for example, the French political “tea” party headed by Marine Le Pen proposed an anti-Muslim law which made wearing headscarves illegal in public. Their new legislation would also prohibit Orthodox Jews from wearing yarmulkes.

The same week, the French satire magazine “Charlie Hebdo” capitalized on the furor over the recent Islamophobic movie, running front and back covers lampooning the Muslim prophet. The back cover was simply pornographic but the front cover broke new ground by presenting hook-nosed caricatures of both a Muslim and a Jew in a single image. When the German satire magazine “Titanic” tackled the Vatican [correspondence] leaks last July, it depicted the Pontiff in various forms of incontinence. The issue was almost immediately pulled out of circulation and images removed from its website. Apparently some kinds of “free speech” are more free than others.

Here in the US, Congressman Peter King conducts his McCarthyesque hearings on Muslims, and some Republicans sound frighteningly like German propagandists of the 1930’s. We learn that the New York City Police has been illegally spying on Muslims not only in Gotham but in New Jersey. And in two dozen states so-called “anti-Shariah” legislation has been filed, authored by the same man, David Yerushalmi, who is one of a number of high-profile haters which include Frank Gaffney, Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Daniel Pipes, and David Horowitz – who frequently present their ugly views of a culture war between “Judeo-Christian” values and Islam.

Feeling obliged to defend the very foundations of Western Civilization itself, these cultural jihadis promote American Exceptionalism, an aggressive Christianity, and snipe at non-interventionists, “multiculturalists” and religious moderates. It is no coincidence that some of the strongest supporters of this supposed “clash of civilizations” are far-right Christians like those who made “Innocence of Muslims” – as well as far-right Jews who have funded films like “Obsession” and “the Third Jihad.”

So when folks like Mr. Atkinson grasp at simple answers to complex issues, they often end up grabbing the wrong thing. Islam is not the Arab world’s only feature. Look at a map of American military bases in the Middle East. One of the only nations that we do not have some type of military presence in is Iran. American foreign policy looms large in everyone’s mind – not only rioting mobs or Al Qaeda plotters – but in the daily lives of the overwhelming majority of peaceful Muslims who experience “surgical” drone strikes, unwelcome military operations, and our propping up repressive governments.

Anarcho-terror groups like Al Qaeda indeed create a stew of politics laced with Islamic supremacism. But then American ideologues infuse their politics with the supremacy of “Judeo-Christian values” (as if Buddhists or Hindus have no place in the national conversation) and tirelessly promote American and Israeli exceptionalism. During my son’s life, he has never known a year in which we were not bombing somebody – and it has cost us trillions. Now our cultural warriors are at it again – calling for jihad against Iran next Spring.

Over a week ago a combination porn/hate film appeared on YouTube. Among other things, it presents an image of a bloodthirsty murderer with odd sexual proclivities, in one scene depicting oral sex. Somehow the actors hired were deceived into thinking they were making an action film depicting George, the “Desert Warrior.” But after green-screen tinkering, scene editing and over-dubbing the actors’ dialogue, a 14-minute trailer called “Innocence of Muslims” became the final product, and it was not an action flick at all — but a hit piece on Islam and the Prophet Mohammad. The trailer was placed on YouTube just in time for the anniversary of 9/11, and the calculated outrage it produced contributed to the death of the American ambassador to Libya and three others.

As the strange case unravelled, it turns out that the film was the work of Egyptian Coptic Christian Islamophobes and American Evangelical Christian Islam-bashers who (contrary to their professed love of “Judeo-Christian” values) concealed their identities and initially blamed it all on Jews. All of the usual suspects, including Qu’ran-burning reverend Terry Jones, promoted the film. The haters were having their fun watching ugly, violent fantasies realized on the big screen. Yet even after their fake identities were revealed, they remained unapologetic. So what if a few people had to die to show how evil Muslims really are?

As children we may have heard the truism, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Well, it just isn’t true. And we’ll never get the chance to ask Ambassador Christopher Stevens for his opinion.

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton condemned both the film and the resulting mob violence. Right wing pundits went on the offensive, defending “free speech” and “freedom of expression,” and condemning the “Muslim” President for capitulating to the Muslim hordes. One would have thought the Caliphate was about to take power in Washington or the Gates of Vienna finally overrun.

YouTube, which is run by Google, blocked the film in several Arab nations, but again the right wing pundits objected to even this symbolic measure intended to cool the outrage. And a symbolic, if not paternalistic, gesture it was. Google’s own techies certainly know that Arab techies are quite familiar with censorship and how to use proxy servers and other techniques to circumvent access limitations.

In the course of normal human interactions, when we have a dispute with someone, we tend to back off bit, try to defuse the situation, let everybody cool off. But Muslim-bashers are not normal humans. They double down on their malice. Like adolescents with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, they go for the grown-ups’ “buttons” — desperate for the attention and respect so few accord them.

So not to be out-done by les Amis, a French cartoonist recalling the great success of his Danish colleague, created some new, juvenile, cartoons of his own lampooning the Muslim prophet. The cover of Charlie Hebdo broke new ground by caricaturing both a Muslim and a Jew in a single image. The back cover, however, was reserved for — again, pornographic — images of the Prophet Mohammad in various poses. The quips in the cartoon bubbles (such as “And my buttocks? You like my buttocks?”) did not exactly provide much in the way of thoughtful insight — raising the legitimate question: exactly what kind of “free speech” was Charlie Hebdo trying to exercise anyway?

But again the “defenders of democracy” insisted that the Islamophobic show must go on. Tanks were deployed in French embassies throughout the Middle East and, just to make sure that the Muslim hordes back in France would not interfere with free speech, demonstrators were actually barred from protesting the cartoons! It was a Gallic triumph for intolerance, but a definite setback for liberté, égalité, and fraternité. And, well, so much for the national motto — not to mention free speech and freedom of assembly. Gratuitous hate trumped everything, especially reason.

Yet we continue to hear that we live in the West where freedom of expression and speech are about the only thing separating us from the Chinese (with whom we are major trading partners), or the Saudis (with whom we are major arms-for-oil partners) — or those damned Islamofascists who would have us memorizing long passages from the Qu’ran in kerosene-lighted madrassas. Western civilization must be preserved at all costs!

But hold on a moment. The West actually does regulate hate speech and practices selective censorship. Antisemitic hate speech and Holocaust denial is illegal in most of the European Union and in about a dozen European nations where no equivalent protection for Muslims exists. In Israel, which exercises military and civilian press censorship, commemorating the Nakba (the Palestinian “catastrophe” which recalls pogroms and the theft of their homes in 1948) is illegal. And recently, when semi-nude photos of the Dutchess of Cambridge emerged, the British press censored itself and the Royal photos were not printed in England. And back in France French police raided a magazine that actually published them.

Here in the U.S., we think of our nation as the ultimate bastion of freedom. But here too censorship is alive and well. By one measure the United States stands behind 46 other nations in press freedoms. During the last several wars the U.S. has waged, the sight of military caskets or photographs of stricken soldiers has been censored. At most recent national political conventions, demonstrators have had to go into cages or cordoned-off areas euphemistically named free speech zones which our Founders probably never envisioned. And systematic surveillance and spying on virtually allAmericans’ electronic communications has a chilling effect on the willingness to exercise those once-Constitutionally-protected freedoms.

When the Pentagon Papers first appeared, the U.S. government censored their publication. When Julian Assange published a trove of WikiLeaks documents, the U.S. government blocked its DNS records and cut off its payment options via Amazon.com and Paypal. As of this date, Google has received 6,192 requests from the U.S. government to censor web content and it has complied with 42% of these requests. Books, too, are still routinely banned in the U.S. The American Library Associations reports that since 1990 over 11,000 books have been banned.

A recent example of how selectively Western censorship operates is the case of the German satire magazine Titanic, which ran a cover with the pope in a cassock with signs of urinary incontinence and the caption, “Hallelujah at the Vatican — the leak has been found!” — referring to a recent scandal over private Vatican correspondence that found its way into a book. A Vatican spokesman responded, “Titanic oversteps every measure of decency,” slapping a legal restraining order on the magazine, which was then forced to withdraw issues from newsstands and pull the images down from its website.

Censorship in the West is doing amazingly well._

Now I certainly don’t want the government locking me up for what I write — although it did so in the case of Tarek Mehanna. In another case, the government won a case against the Humanitarian Law Project, which only wanted to offer Kurdish rebels ways of resolving conflicts with the Turkish government. The California State Assembly wants to outlaw criticism of Israel on campuses. And I’d rather not have the government assassinate me just because it suspects I’m a dangerous radical. We don’t need any more censorship than we already have. It’s too easily abused.

But government censorship in the age of the internet may pale in comparison to the ability of multinational corporations to either censor content — or promote select content outside national boundaries. In a recent posting on Foreign Policy, Robert C. Post, dean at Yale Law School, wrote:

A looming question raised by Innocence of Muslims is how we should conceptualize the public function played by international companies like Google. On the one hand, they may render our constitutional principles all but irrelevant, since in a digital world private companies will wield the sovereign prerogative of effective censorship. On the other hand, the absence of constitutional restraint will authorize private companies to respond flexibly and pragmatically, in ways that the American government cannot, to the inevitable crises that will accompany an international clash of cultures.

Post makes a good argument that government censorship is largely irrelevant. In Europe, where Holocaust denial is outlawed, those so inclined can still find neo-Nazi propaganda here in the United States — just two clicks away.

And so I reluctantly defend the haters’ right to spread their vile propaganda. But I wonder what kind of sick society so willingly encourages it through repetition of lies until it starts to ring almost true. What kind of sick society gratuitously and habitually puts so much hate into satire, into magazines, into film, into blogs, into everyday discourse? As a card-carrying member of the ACLU, I nevertheless harbor the fear that the damage to civil democracy by such extreme and pervasive hate speech actually outweighs the value of preserving the right to say such things.

So, to those of you — US, Danish, French, German, whatever — who think you are defending freedom by actually generating hate speech — you’re dead wrong. You’re simply looking for an excuse to spew some secret malice. And to those of you who think that governments should ban hate speech — you’re also wrong. Governments, even in the West, selectively choose what and whom they want to ban and none of us should willingly give away even one freedom more to any regime that toys with freedom so carelessly. Keeping in mind that government’s dominion is ultimately weaker than the Internet’s.

Finally, when it comes to hate speech, the issue really boils down to civility. Can a civil democracy survive when it ceases being civil? Can it survive when its minorities live in fear of relentless persecution by the Leitkultur? Not for a thousand years, and not for three hundred.

It seems like a day doesn’t go by without a mosque being blocked, burnt, or picketed by racists. An ignorant “patriot” murders a group of Sikhs because he thinks they’re Muslims. Republicans, besides their usual dismissal of Blacks, gays and Latinos, show a special fondness for demonizing Muslims. Congressman Peter King regularly convenes McCarthyesque show hearings on the Muslim Menace. And in two dozen states these haters have filed “anti-Shariah” legislation authored by a Jewish White Supremacist that serves no purpose other than to show their hatred of Muslims and to proclaim their preference for the “Judeo-Christian” way of life.

CAIR, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the FBI, all report an alarming increase in murders, assaults, arson, and property damage directed against Muslims. Hate crimes against Muslims are up 50% — and it’s largely the byproduct of a small group of Islamophobic extremists, a well-financed crusade that cranks out books, blogs, and movies like the one that surfaced last week — and which funds think tanks and talking heads on FOX News and other right wing outlets. Disturbingly, these hate-filled messages are nothing but recycled antisemitism: Muslims are the new Jews and Islamophobia is the new antisemitism.

Although today some regard it a sign of an enlightened democracy to permit Muslim-bashing and hate speech of this sort to go unchallenged, let’s not kid ourselves: hate propaganda kills. The Holocaust and the thousands of attacks in recent years on Muslims and those perceived to be “soft” on them by the far right, such as in Norway last year, illustrate this all too well. But there was a time when the United States recognized the lethality of hate speech. In October of 1946, during the Nuremberg trials, Nazi propagandistJulius Streicher was hanged — not for murder but for his “journalistic” career devoted to demonizing Jews.

Colm O’Broin has compared some of Streicher’s antisemitic screeds to current Islamophobic talking points written primarily by Robert Spencer, who is a friend and advisor to just about every right-wing ideologue in the United States, not to mention the author of now-discredited FBI training materials. Many of the quotes O’Broin chose are taken from the Nuremberg trial transcripts or Streicher’s propaganda paper, Der Stürmer. In a few cases I have changed O’Broin’s wording or chosen a different quote. I have also added two points. Clicking on an author’s link will bring up the original quote.

Below are the main points both the Nazi antisemites and contemporary Islamophobes hammer away on. They are amazingly, eerily, disturbingly similar.

1. Muslims/Jews have a religious duty to conquer the world.

“Islam understands its earthly mission to extend the law of Allah over the world by force.” — Robert Spencer

“Do you not know that the God of the Old Testament orders the Jews to consume and enslave the peoples of the earth?” — Julius Streicher

2. The Left enables Muslims/Jews.

“… the principal organs of the Left, which in its [sic] hardened hatred of the West has consistently been warm and welcoming toward Islamic supremacism…” — Robert Spencer on jihadwatch.org

“The communists pave the way for him [the Jew].” — Julius Streicher

3. Governments do nothing to stop Muslims/Jews.

” FDI acts against the treason being committed by national, state, and local government officials, the mainstream media, and others in their capitulation to the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, the ever-encroaching and unconstitutional power of the federal government, and the rapidly moving attempts to impose socialism and Marxism upon the American people.” — Freedom Defense Initiative, a Robert Spencer/Pamela Geller organization

“The government allows the Jew to do as he pleases. The people expect action to be taken.” — Julius Streicher

4. Muslims/Jews cannot be trusted.

” [Muslim] believers may legitimately deceive unbelievers when under pressure.” — Robert Spencer

“In the Jewish lawbook ‘Talmud’ the Jews are told that the possessions of gentiles were ‘ownerless property,’ which the Jew was allowed to obtain through deceit and cheating.” — Julius Streicher

5. Recognizing the true nature of Muslims/Jews can be difficult.

“…there is no reliable way for American authorities to distinguish jihadists and potential jihadists from peaceful Muslims.” — Robert Spencer

“Just as it is often hard to tell a toadstool from an edible mushroom, so too it is often very hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal.” — From The Toadstool, a children’s book published by Julius Streicher

6. The evidence against Muslims/Jews is in their holy books.

“What exactly is ‘hate speech’ about quoting Qur’an verses and then showing Muslim preachers using those verses to exhort people to commit acts of violence, as well as violent acts committed by Muslims inspired by those verses and others?” — Robert Spencer

“In Der Stürmer no editorial appeared, written by me or written by anyone of my main co-workers, in which I did not include quotations from the ancient history of the Jews, from the Old Testament, or from Jewish historical works of recent times.” — Julius Streicher

7. Islamic/Jewish texts encourage violence against non-believers.

“And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter…” — Surah 2:191, a Koranic verse quoted by Robert Spencer on Jihadwatch.org

“Deuteronomy 7:16 expresses that command to hate that Moses received at Sinai from the Jewish God Jahwe. It says: ‘You will destroy all the peoples of the earth, whom Jahwe will give into your hands. You shall have no mercy on them.” — inaccurate Biblical verse quoted by Julius Streicher in Der Stürmer

8. Christianity is peaceful while Islam/Judaism is violent.

“There is no Muslim version of ‘love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you’ or ‘if anyone strikes you on the right cheek turn to him the other also’.” — Robert Spencer in “Islam Unveiled”

“The Jew is not being taught, like we are, such texts as, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,’ or ‘If you are smitten on the left cheek, offer then your right one.” — Julius Streicher

9. Muslims/Jews are uniquely violent.

“(Islam) is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.” — Robert Spencer

“No other people in the world has such prophecies. No other people would dare to say that it was chosen to murder and destroy the other peoples and steal their possessions.” — Julius Streicher

10. Criticising Muslims/Jews is not incitement to violence against Muslims/Jews.

“There is nothing in anything that I have ever written that could be reasonably construed as an incitement to violence against anyone.” — Robert Spencer

“Allow me to add that it is my conviction that the contents of Der Stürmer as such were not (incitement). During the whole 20 years, I never wrote in this connection, ‘Burn Jewish houses down; beat them to death.’ Never once did such an incitement appear in Der Stürmer.” — Julius Streicher

11. God-Bashing: The Muslim/Jewish God is not “our” God

It’s not enough to demonize a people and their religion. Ultimately, you have to blame their God. And in order to do that, you have to deny that their God is the same as yours. Hey, the Nazis did it. The Islamophobes have followed suit.

“In the same way, it is possible that the Qur’an and Islamic tradition present a picture of God so radically different from that of the Bible and Catholic tradition that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the proposition that they are the same Being in both traditions, apart from some minor creedal differences.” — Robert Spencer and this too

“Deuteronomy 7:16 expresses that command to hate that Moses received at Sinai from the Jewish God Jahwe. It says: ‘You will destroy all the peoples of the earth, whom Jahwe will give into your hands. You shall have no mercy on them.” — inaccurate Biblical quote by Julius Streicher in Der Stürmer

12. People who defend Muslims/Jews are secret race-traitor followers

When it’s not sufficient to bash governments for failing to wage a pogrom on Jews/Muslims, you have to resort to name-calling. Progressive Democrats and others who refuse to demonize Muslims must be Muslims themselves, just as for Streicher the FDR administration had all become Jewish, as if by a bacterial infection. Streicher pre-dated Orly Taitz’s Birtherism and the Tea Party’s obsession with Shariah Law in his “What is Americanism?”

Inflating the significance of individuals and downplaying the power of political and social movements is common. Common, but wrong. “Camelot,” John Kennedy’s administration, is a good example of how a fantasy built around an individual often overtakes reality. We remember the haircut but forget that Kennedy pulled the nation deeper into Viet Nam and botched the Bay of Pigs.

Near the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death and now upon the death of Nelson Mandela, we see the same tendency to inflate the influence and power of these individuals, to ignore the social and political contexts, and to downplay their human and political faults.

Perhaps, with the 50^th anniversary of Kennedy’s killing so fresh, Bob Unger can be forgiven somewhat for doing the same with Abraham Lincoln’s legacy. His contention (“Lincoln’s death robbed U.S. of reconciliation”) is that if Lincoln had lived the U.S. might have been spared Reconstruction and the culture wars.

It is fair to say that the humiliation of the South and the devastating effects of Abolition to its economy, based as it was on human trafficking, led to Lincoln’s assassination. In South Carolina and Mississippi, the slave population was actually greater than the white population. In Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia, slaves represented 44%, 46%, 47%, and 48% of the total population. In Jefferson and Washington’s Virginia – in the Upper South – there was one slave for every two free whites.

Despite Mr. Unger’s contention, Reconstruction did not begin after Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865. It had begun some two years earlier. By the time of Lincoln’s death the South’s economy was in tatters and the rise of “terrorist” organizations like the KKK required a Federal response. The South’s “way of life,” not the political power of a racial elite, was at stake.

South Africa is a completely different story. White Afrikaaners were a miniscule minority (whites now account for 8% of the population) but they ran an industrialized economy and may even have had the Bomb. Mandela was the figurehead of a substantial national liberation movement – a movement of and by black South Africans. There was nothing like this among American slaves. In contrast, the War between the States was fought over tariffs, slaves (to be sure), but a variety of issues largely viewed as economic. The Civil War transformed the U.S. from an agrarian nation into an industrial one – and not only in the South.

The questions we should ask are: if Mandela had been murdered (like Steve Biko and many others) and had not been the figurehead of the ANC, would there have been another Mandela? Certainly. Because injustice would still have required a response.

And if Lincoln had lived, would he have created a national reconciliation movement that would have been able to erase the shock of the end of slavery for 8 million Southern whites? The answer is obvious as well: of course not. Pretty unlikely. And doubly unlikely that a single man could have pulled it off.

This was published in the Standard Times on December 23, 2013
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20131223/opinion/312230315

I wanted to find out what the kerfluffle over “creeping Shariah” was all about. After all, this is a Republican worry in thirteen states which have introduced anti-shariah laws. And apparently it’s more serious than even a global economic Depression.

So I went to a blog by the promising name of “Creeping Shariah” and its matching Twitter feed for some hard answers.

The website promised to easily locate the numerous recent cases of jihad being waged on our very shores. In Massachusetts alone there were forty incidents of jihad, as those sly Mahometans managed to finesse a Muslim holiday in Cambridge, plotted to build a cemetery in Belchertown, and the Muslim Brotherhood had apparently consulted with Whitey Bulger to get governor Duval Patrick to build a mega-mosque in Bah-stahn.

Those armed-and-dangerous ladies from Code Pink were raising money for Hamas, CAIR was at it again, trying to help out some headscarf-toting Muslim terrorists at a Boston pharmacy school, Yale University was cozying up to faculty jihadis by not re-inviting an Islamophobe to come back for a conference, and some crazy Mooslim women troublemakers in Kansas City wanted to wear Islamic-style bathing gear in a pool. The fate of our pools, our children, and our very nation were at stake. And all this trouble from a bunch of Muslim women, no less.

Beside the fact that New Haven and Kansas City are not exactly in Massachusetts, most of the other “incidents” reported were endlessly-recycled hate blurbs from people like Pamela Gellar and Rick Santorum – which, I will grant you – do constitute a sort of domestic terror. But most of the postings were over a year old. Maybe getting all that “news” onto his website was just too overwhelming for him. HTML can be so wordy.

But now I was really curious. Incidents of creeping shariah and jihad were obviously so numerous, so dangerous, and so troubling that perhaps a Twitter feed could provide better real-time coverage of the onslaught. And surely the feed would corroborate a pattern of Islamification of our beloved heterosexual, fetus-friendly, pro-capitalist, White-loving, brown-skin-hating, Ayn Randophilic, Judeo-Christian-based culture! I went online looking for more answers.

And answers I found. More attacks on Keith Ellison, indignation at a Toronto school which tried to accommodate a Muslim student who wanted to pray quietly in a corner of its library, and the unmitigated gall of the town of Farmington, Michigan, to sell an unused school to an Islamic cultural association. Truly disturbing stuff, indeed!

Elsewhere in the tweets were some on a Republican congressman (Wolf, R-VA) going after CAIR via the IRS, Judicial Watch going after CAIR, and disappointment that CAIR could sue a former intern who stole tens of thousands of documents for his Islamophobe father, Paul Gaubatz. I made a mental note to give CAIR a donation.

There was also a speech by Geert Wilders at the Cornerstone Church in Nashville, part of his “Warning to America” event, which concluded with the words:

You and I, Americans and Europeans, we belong to a common Western culture. We share the ideas and ideals of our common Judeo-Christian heritage. In order to pass this heritage on to our children and grandchildren, we must stand together, side by side, in our struggle against Islamic barbarism. That, my friends, is why I am here. I am here to forge an alliance. Our international freedom alliance. We must stand together for the Judeo-Christian West. We will not allow islam to overrun Israel and Europe, the cradle of the judeo-Christian civilization.

Wow. Now I get it. Only Leni Riefenstahl was missing from the picture. Or was that Hermann Goering?

I mean, thank goodness I’m a Jew! It wasn’t that long ago that Nordic types like Wilders were saying the same thing about my people. Now with the cool kids expanded to “European Judeo-Christians” and not just Christians anymore, I could join a select club and kick around Muslims if I wanted to – rather than just being a Yid whose faith and culture was once characterized by Nazis exactly as Wilders paints Islam at churches and synagogues today.

I’d get with his program, but all I’d have to do is stop trying to be a mensch. That and the stench Wilder’s words would leave in my mouth.

Today’s opinion page was a smorgasbord of conservative thought on lessons to be drawn from 9/11. I don’t know whether it’s News Corp finally exerting its right-wing politics on the paper, a new editorial policy, or what, but we seem to be treated to an increasing dose of reprints of editorials from the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Washington Post and the Weekly Standard. None of the articles on 9/11 were particularly illuminating, but they sure did manage to defend the militaristic and Constitution-hostile world created by the former president and continued by the current one. Even Mr. Obama’s appeal to unity the previous day only papered over the reasons we now find ourselves in never-ending war.

Rather than cloaking ourselves in martyrdom, we should be asking ourselves, honestly, why so much of the world hates us. And, no, it’s not because they hate us for what we have. A lot of the world hates us for what we are doing.

The first essay by Omar Ashmawy, a military prosecutor who did not have enough misgivings about the dubious enterprise at Guantanamo to work there himself, regrets that the US military and law enforcement officers are so ignorant of Muslims and Arab culture. There is nothing wrong with this at all, but Ashmawy makes no mention of our distorted foreign policy in the Middle East as the obvious source of hatred of the United States. It serves little purpose for the FBI and Homeland Security to stop reading Islamophobes and start studying real Middle Eastern scholars when most of the Republican presidential candidates have signed on to Muslim-bashing legislation, Congressman Peter King is conducting antisemitic (in the broadest sense of the word) witch hunts, when we have covert drone wars going on in Arab countries in addition to our public ones, we support an indefensible occupation in Palestine, while half our freshmen congressmen spent their summer recess in Israel, and we honor the Arab Spring by defending despots in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. We’re either ignorant, stupid, arrogant, simply don’t care, or some mixture of all of the above. But it’s a recipe for people hating us.

Similarly, the Washington Post’s article is another salute to the conventional wisdom and learning nothing from the preceding decade. There is no mention of the shredding of civil liberties – except where the Patriot Act is defended as “modest” and prudent. No mention of the loss of habeus corpus, widespread wiretaps, email snooping, monitoring of social networking, and the loss of many of our core civil liberties. The article echoes the Heritage Foundation’s distortion that military expenditures over GDP are smaller today than during the Cold War – which is true, except that both military expenditures per capita and as a percentage of our national budget have risen sharply since the Cold War. And much of the divisor, the gross domestic product, is offshore nowadays, in contrast to the Cold War when we still had a domestic manufacturing base. Today more of our tax money goes to killing people in other countries than ever before. The Washington Post’s article warns of “prematurely” getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan – despite the fact that these are already the longest wars in American history. In short, the Washington Post advocates permanent war.

Finally we are treated to a defense of Dick Cheney by neoconservative Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes. Cheney is on a tour promoting his new book, “In My Time,” and apparently Hayes, who has another book of his own on the former vice president, is simultaneously trying to sell it and rehabilitate a man whose book, if I had my way, would be titled “Doing My Time.” Cheney most certainly is a neoconservative, helped kick off the neocon think tank Project for the New American Century, is married to a neocon, most certainly did attempt to expand the powers of the executive branch, and most assuredly does not lose one second of sleep over his involvement in the most disastrous American war since the Civil War. Why, on an anniversary of 9/11, is the Standard Times interested in repairing Cheney’s image with bald lies? A better editorial might have examined how a relatively small group of neoconservatives managed to steer the nation onto the rocks.

This was published in the Standard Times on September 14, 2011
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20110914/opinion/109140341

The golden days of Summer are for days at the beach. And days at the beach mean sunscreen, proper hydration, a snack, sunglasses, and a good book to read. But if you’re like me, you may be running out of thrillers. But no worry! We’ve got some great recommendations of fiction from – yes! – the FBI. But first some context.

In recent days, the Norway shootings have revealed a huge number of connections with American hate groups and so called Islam experts. Despite the huge number of these groups, Department of Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano took it on the chin from right-wingers last April for suggesting it even exists. The Southern Poverty Law Center and former DHS investigator Darryl Johnson have written that Napolitano caved to right-wing criticism and dismantled a unit responsible for investigating home-grown terror in 2009. A report by CNN’s Anderson Cooper recently revealed that one of the many “Islam experts” feeding at the government trough who has trained DHS employees, Walid Shoebat, is a complete fraud. Congressman Peter King is still running his McCarthyite hearings on American Muslims, and instead of focusing on real terror, national paranoia has now led to effectively ignoring domestic threats and instead demonizing one of our own religious communities. It all sort of reminds me a bit of the obsession with Jews by the Jüdische Abteilung of the Nazi bureaucracy.

But, people! There’s a silver lining in all this rain! A recent Freedom of Information Act request forced the disclosure of a PowerPoint and other materials the FBI used to train agents on dealing with Muslims. The materials themselves, as well as the recommended readings, are fascinating in a crude, reptilian sort of way – in their demonization of Muslims by the authors, many of whom, it turns out, know bupkus about Islam or have their own axe to grind. If you want some exciting fiction, ladies and gents, it doesn’t get any better or more fictional than this!

So without further ado, here is the FBI’s recommended Summer Reading List on The Evil Moozlim Threat:

The Arab Mind (Raphael Patai)

“The book came to public attention in 2004 after investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writing for the New Yorker magazine revealed that the book was ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior’ to the effect that it was the source of the idea held by the US military officials responsible for the Abu Ghraib scandal that ‘Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation’.”

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (Robert Spencer)

This book should simply be titled “The Incorrect Guide to Islam” because it is a hack job by someone who lacks any academic qualifications in Islamic studies. This book’s many similarities to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” should not be overlooked by librarians.

The Truth about Muhammad (Robert Spencer)

Karen Armstrong sums up this one best: “Like any book written in hatred, his new work is a depressing read. Spencer makes no attempt to explain the historical, political, economic and spiritual circumstances of 7th-century Arabia, without which it is impossible to understand the complexities of Muhammad’s life. Consequently he makes basic and bad mistakes of fact. Even more damaging, he deliberately manipulates the evidence.”

The Quran Itself

No doubt included for those who want to selectively hunt the Qu’ran for suspicious passages.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam (Yahiha Emerick)

Of this appropriately-titled book, one reviewer wrote: “Throughout the book Yahya Emerick seems to be getting his information from modern fringe scholars who are not representive of the majority in Islam. Many of the ‘reformers’ he mentioned and praised were founders of extremist movements and many people believe these men caused a lot of damage to Islam. I personally do not think Mr. Emerick is qualified to say many of the things he does, I think he should have co-authored the book with a recognised mainstream scholar. There are also many other things, and then some of the information about shias is very incorrect, I am not shia but I found the ignorance about the shia side of Islam offensive. I personally could not give this book to a non muslim because of the errors and minority views it contains…”

Islam and Terrorism (Mark Gabriel, PhD)

From the Amazon.com blurb: “After earning a Ph.D. in Islamic history, Mark A. Gabriel became convinced that Muhammad did not speak for God. His search for truth led to the love of Jesus Christ, as well as complete rejection from his family and two attempts against his life by political fundamentalists. Now pursuing a Ph.D. in world religion at a Christian university, he speaks and writes about the true nature of Islam with the non-emotional accuracy of an academician. As a reflection of his new life in Christ, he has chosen a Christian name to replace his Islamic name.” Objective?

Milestones (Sayyid Qutb)

Qutb’s book is hopefully intended as an introduction to political Islamism, not as a serious study of how most Muslims look at society, particularly European and American Muslims. From an NPR program on Qutb: “Egyptian writer and educator Sayyid Qutb spent the better half of 1949 in Greeley, Colo., studying curriculum at Colorado State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Colorado. What he saw prompted him to condemn America as a soulless, materialistic place that no Muslim should aspire to live in. Qutb’s writings would later become the theoretical basis for many radical Islamic groups of today — including al Qaeda. Qutb increasingly saw the redemption of Egypt in the application of Islamic law.” About as representative of all Muslims as reading – oh I don’t know – Che Guevara.

Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands (Terri Morrison and Wayne Conaway)

Why this book is included is anyone’s guess.

The question should not be “Why can’t we all just get along?” It should be “How can we afford not to?”

In a rapidly shrinking world made even smaller by the import of foreign workers, offshoring, trade agreements, globalization, and refugees, multiculturalism is under renewed attack. Although there’s significant help from the more racist elements of White America and from the Tea Party, hostility to multiculturalism is shared by the German Chancellor; a majority of House Republicans; Black Americans like Louis Farrakhan, Herman Cain and Allen West; Christians like Pat Robertson and Andreas Breivik; Jews like Ayn Rand, Pamela Geller and David Horowitz; Indians like Dinesh DiSouza; Muslims like the late Osama bin Laden; the heads of state of nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia; pundits like Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh; and conspiracy theorists like Orly Taitz and The Donald. Pardon me if I missed a few million.

What all these examples show, though, is that there will always be people who can’t play nice with others. They also serve to remind us that one person’s victim can quickly become another’s tormenter. Being persecuted yourself does not automatically guarantee compassion for others. Sadly, it often has the opposite effect.

But changes in demographics are virtually impossible to roll back. Large-scale Jewish resettlement of Israel began half a century ago. Palestinians were there for centuries. But nobody’s going anywhere. American descendants of slaves have no African home to return to. Many Latinos living in Texas are the descendants of those who were there when the United States took it from Mexico. To Native Americans the arrival of Europeans was not a welcome development, but where are the voices calling for 200 million Europeans to return to the Old Country? The descendants of South African white settlers are still trying to figure out their place in a post-Apartheid nation. Indian and Chinese merchants have old, established communities on almost every continent. The fingerprints of British, French, and Portuguese colonialism are all over Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The handiwork of Spanish colonialism is seen all over most of the Americas. The least and most recent of these global changes has been an influx of Muslims into Europe, whether resulting from French colonialism or the German Gastarbeiter program. Yet, apparently, there are those who believe they can just roll back the clock on all this change.

What’s done is done.

Multiculturalism encompasses more than ethnicity and language. It has certainly been a shock to many American fundamentalists and conservatives to discover that we have Gay culture, Green culture, liberal culture, conservative culture, religious culture, secular culture, and a bewildering assortment of others. Amazingly, not all families look like June and Ward Cleaver’s, and this has been difficult for many to accept in an economic system where White Protestantism was once dominant and automatically conferred economic and social advantages on its members over all others.

Faced with the reality of change, the only sensible approach is to accept reality. Fundamentalism, racism, ignorance, fear, or self-interest blinds people to what is rational. Their first impulse is to try to make unwelcome interlopers or the new competition pick up and leave. We see this in the Zionist state, where Arabs are hounded from their homes and villages, even in Israel proper. We see this in a variety of Muslim states where Shi’ites, Alawites, Copts, Sufis, and others are persecuted or driven out. We see this in a dozen American states which have instituted laws for ostensibly preventing illegal immigration but whose real function is to harass and send the message to Latinos: you don’t belong here. We see it in new voter registration laws that attempt to disenfranchise minority, poor, and immigrant voters. It’s no coincidence that many of these same states had Jim Crow laws not so long ago.

Resistance to all this change is futile. But why embrace multiculturalism?

First, the world is the way it is because we have changed it. We have to live with the reality and the consequences of how we’ve changed it. Cross burnings and lynchings or the demonization of people who are, for better or worse, now our neighbors doesn’t unravel reality. It only serves to criminalize and destabilize society, to trivialize the meaning of our Constitution, and to divide communities. Embracing reality is really the only sane option. We can’t move forward if we don’t think rationally.

Second, we strengthen democracy by being inclusive, not by building walls. What does it say about our so-called democracy, in the 21^st Century, when gays still do not have all the legal protections of any other class of citizens? If we are truly so concerned about the institution of marriage, why is there such a preoccupation with keeping the fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, and Muslim ideal of heterosexual marriage the standard, and so little interest in keeping families together or raising healthy, well-educated children? Inclusivity focuses on what we all have in common, rather than attempting to preserve some advantage for just our own group or foisting our own religious views on the rest of society.

On those rare occasions in which Americans have been attacked we have felt a remarkable connection to each other, regardless of culture or religion. In the first days after 9/11, there we were — giving blood, saying prayers, just helping each other. But within days we needed to find someone to blame — and the nativists chose Muslims, Sikhs, Indians, or brown-skinned people whom they thought were Muslims. They weren’t picky. Any number of people were beaten, stabbed, shot, and that was just the beginning. These acts of hate may have sufficed to unite xenophobes, but it did not united the rest of society. Faced with economic hardship, the nativist looks accusingly at the undocumented worker. Faced with doubts about the nation’s future, he grasps at straws, believing that simpler times, simpler rules, a simpler mix of people will make everything all right.

But we can create a sense of shared values, compassion, and true connections to teach other by welcoming multiculturalism.

We are blessed with a vibrant mix of people here in the United States. We’ve got just about every language spoken on earth. Go to Washington DC and you’ll often hear Amharic on your cab driver’s radio — at least until the next wave of immigrants replaces the Ethiopians in the taxi business. We’ve got Spanglish. We’ve got Yiddish. We’ve got Creole. Different Creoles. We’ve got tortillas and spaghetti, Swedish meatballs and sushi, baba ganoush and blintzes, hot dogs and crepes, kale soup and cornbread. And there’s the fusion of all these. Instead of a bright white light, we have a dazzling prism of color in film, music, art, theater, and literature. Every religion is here, every spiritual dialect used to talk to God.

Besides the incredible, beautiful, variety within our society, new Americans are a credit, not a debit in demographic and economic terms. While European population growth is flat, ours is growing. This means that the future generation will be large enough to buoy economic growth, even when many of us today are long retired.

Our strength has always been new citizens bringing new strength to an old democracy-in-progress. In every case new Americans have adopted the national story as passionately as each previous group. Multiculturalism is the celebration and the embrace of this ongoing change. The alternative is stagnation, hate, and the erosion of our democratic principles.

Last year in a talk to the youth of her Christian Democratic Union party, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared MultiKulti (multiculturalism) to be dead in Germany. Economist Thilo Sarrizin from the Sozialdemoktratische Partei Deutschland broke with his own party to declare it a failure as well in a badly researched book. In Norway a member of the far Right angered by his own country’s embrace of multiculturalism, and exemplified by what he regarded as Creeping Shariah in Europe, murdered many of the next generation of leaders of the Norwegian Labor Party – all children. The fanaticism with which the Right in America has pursued anti-Immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim, anti-Gay, anti-Feminist, and anti-Secularist rhetoric and legislation, and has had such a bug up its ass since a Black president was elected, got me thinking that when it comes right down to it, race mixing is what really upsets them.

All this got me thinking of the ultimate example of multiculturalism we probably all saw years ago in George Lucas’s Star Wars. I mean, of course, the bar scene on a remote outpost in space. I went looking for the image and found what I was looking for:

But apparently I was not the first. Our old dependable racist pill popper, Rush Limbaugh, beat me to it, I’m ashamed to say he even had the same picture in mind:

I’m sure Rush would much prefer an America that looks like this homogenous group of ansehnliche Jugendliche:

Yesterday’s terrorist attack in Norway was totally expected.

Of course, when it occurred, the first fingers jabbed into the air were pointed accusingly at Muslims. The Washington Post’s necon columnist Jennifer Rubin didn’t bother for any pesky facts to come in before quoting extensively from an article in the Weekly Standard: “We don’t know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today’s events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra.” Rubin expanded the Standard’s neocon arguments to demand more defense spending. The Washington Post never published an update or retraction.

The New York Times also published a headline somewhat prematurely: “Blasts and Gun Attack in Norway; 7 Dead – Powerful Explosions Hit Oslo; Jihadis Claim Responsibility.” The problem was that no such thing had occurred.

Even President Obama got into the act. “It’s a reminder that the entire international community holds a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring,” he said, referring to al Qaeda.

But because of the climate of sanctioned and encouraged hate speech here in the United States, it was a surprise to me that the attack did not originate here – in the cradle of anger, paranoia, and hatred.

The proliferation of anti-immigrant and xenophobic groups like Pamela Geller’s “Atlas Shrugs” has created a large network of hate websites, encouraging violence against foreigners (Muslims principally) and giving a forum to foreign xenophobes like Geert Wilders and neo-Nazi groups like the English Defense League. It turns out that the alleged Norwegian attacker, Anders Behring Breivik, was a regular contributor to “Atlas Shrugs” over several years. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which previously used to track the KKK, now has a full-time job tracking militia groups, “sovereigns,” neo-Nazis, various “Aryan churches,” the “Christian identity” movement, and a slew of groups which violently target Blacks, gays, Muslims, abortion doctors, immigrants, “secularists,” and others.

But if you think these insects are only hiding under a couple of rocks, an NAACP study of the Tea Party movement last year identified these same elements in six of the seven Tea Party organizations [http://www.naacp.org/pages/tea-party-report].

A typical example (from the report): “Larry Pratt of Virginia is a member of two different national Tea Party networks: Tea Party Nation and 1776 Tea Party. He has been promoting the gun and militia movement for years. In 1992 he spoke at a Colorado meeting of Aryan Nations leaders, former Ku Klux Klansmen, and adherents of so-called ‘Christian Identity’ — a doctrine in which Jews are considered Satanic and persons of color are referred to as ‘mud people.'”

No rational person can claim to understand how Constitution’s protections are being applied nowadays. Freedom of association, speech, privacy, and assembly are all under attack by our rapidly-expanding security apparatus and security-friendly courts. But paradoxically we have never been freer to advocate shooting our neighbors in the head with a fifty caliber weapon. Last week a federal appeals court defended the rights of a right-wing racist, Walter Bagdasarian, who had called for Barak Obama’s assassination. In 2008 Bagdasarian, in a Yahoo financial forum, called Obama a “n––” and wrote “he will have a 50 cal in the head soon.” He posted another comment 20 minutes later that said “shoot the n––.”

This insanity occurs within religious groups that should know better. Any number of Christian churches, including the infamous Westboro church, have hosted Dutch extremist Geert Wilders. Although primarily a Christian fundamentalist assault on secularism and a competing religion, as a Jew it rankles me that even a Stoughton Jewish congregation has hosted Wilders, who has extensive links to European neo-Nazis. A Muslim I know has likened the current climate for Muslims in the U.S. to the Germany of 1935 for Jews. He’s absolutely right.

The argument for “tolerance” may well be that democracy cannot afford to legislate civility. But what kind of civil society can survive if even the most violent forms of hate speech are permitted?

So, friends and neighbors, just keep watching the news. Al Qaeda is the least of our worries. It’s only a matter of time before someone — encouraged by their fundamentalist church, a right-wing synagogue, a Tea Party congressman, or some bizarre court ruling — harvests the fruit of the pervasive hate in this sick society.

This was published in the Standard Times on July 26, 2011
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20110726/opinion/107260318

This week the Wiesenthal Center announced that it had purchased a letter written in 1919, the first statement by a young Adolf Hitler proposing the removal of Jews from Germany.

Flash forward almost one hundred years later, in much of the United States it is now open season on Muslims. The number of attacks on mosques, particularly in the South, is now in the hundreds. Besides Quran burnings and mosque arson, Muslims have been beaten, stabbed, and shot. Even Sikhs (who are not Muslim but who wear turbans) and other brown-skinned people have been attacked. Hate groups freely sponsor talks by bigots like Geerd Wilders, often at churches and synagogues. “Anti-shariah” laws have been sponsored in numerous states; the goal is to outlaw religious courts similar to Jewish battei din, which their ignorant sponsors claim is going to replace secular law (which they want to outlaw themselves by pushing a fundamentalist Christian agenda).

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports a huge resurgence in white militias and hate groups. The Washington Post reports that approximately one hundred cases of domestic, right-wing terrorism have  been weakly pursued, or not at all, since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Meanwhile, gays, lesbians, and transgendered people are still trying to get a modicum of justice. In the minds of the same bible-thumping, Quran-burning fundamentalists, permitting Bob and Jim to get married is going to somehow destroy their own marriages.

And it’s all so petty. This morning I read in these pages that permitting transgendered children to use school lavatories would cause the end of civilization as we know it. It probably never occurred to the writer, a former teacher, that the incredibly minuscule number of children who would supposedly throw schools into such chaos could probably simply use the faculty bathrooms.

But the shrill voices just never shut up. We constantly hear attacks on gays in the military, illegal aliens, unions, environmental regulations, helping our neighbors, paying our fair share of taxes, and any number of things of which Ayn Rand would not approve.

Sixteen states have copied Arizona’s anti-Latino bill, SB 1070. The goal? Removing evil “illegal” foreigners from our midst.

And now, this week in our own community, a Guatemalan man was stabbed in a hate crime, allegedly by a thirteen year-old. I don’t know what was worse – the crime itself or the age of the perpetrator.

The specter of Mr. Hitler usually invokes some Jungian archetype of the ultimate evil, unbounded hate that humans simply cannot comprehend, some abstract demonic impulse, something paranormal.

But Mr. Hitler was hardly a demon. He was, unfortunately, much like us. Exactly like us.

Today, if his name were not so widely known, Mr. Hitler’s ideas would be warmly praised by the religious right – as they were in fact for a time in the Thirties here in the U.S. Because what Hitler wanted was not really so different from what the American religious right wanted then and wants today – a “purified” Christianized culture, preferably overflowing with White Protestants.

It was a relatively short twenty years from Hitler’s letter to the Final Solution. People today cannot comprehend how Germany, a nation of rational people, the most advanced technologically at the time, could have permitted itself to slide into insanity so fast.

Do we have to wait another twenty years before we understand?

The Standard Times editor has apparently jumped on the Terry Jones bandwagon (“Blame violent Islam for deaths”). Not only does the editor appear to share a few of Jones’ own Islamophobic views, he completely misunderstands this as a religious response to the continuing, unwelcome American presence in Afghanistan.

The editor’s last words are: “Let us remember… that Terry Jones might be an irresponsible fool, but he is not responsible for the murder of innocent foreigners in Afghanistan. Those who … practice a faith that they insist commands them to use violence in the service of an angry God are the ones with the blood of innocents on their hands.”

The editor’s use of the words “in the service of an angry God” is horrifying. I doubt he has been trained as a theologian and his inference belies the ignorant Muslim-bashing in vogue today and the rejection of the fact that Muslims worship the same God of Abraham that most Americans do. As for the Angry God, the god of hate is the terracotta idol Reverend Jones apparently worships.

In the 2007 Pew Research study cited in the editorial, “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream” (http://www.pewresearch.org/assets/pdf/muslim-americans.pdf), 26% of American Muslims under 30 did not entirely repudiate suicide bombings as a tactic. Yet in the same study we find that 82% of all American Muslims over 30 see absolutely no justification for it.

But if the editor thinks these figures are “alarming,” let’s look at “mainstream” American values regarding the killing of civilians. I think you’ll see they have nothing to do with religion, but everything to do with politics.

For example, the majority of the American public supported dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright told anchorwoman Lesley Stahl that the sanctions-related deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth it” in order to apply pressure on Saddam Hussein.

And let’s not forget the numerous Afghan and Pakistani civilians who are “accidentally” murdered by drones as I write this. Or the thousands of Vietnamese who were cremated by napalm air strikes. Or the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians murdered in “Shock and Awe” – all for nothing. Or the millions of civilians we have left to the whims and caprices of homicidal dictators our own State Department supports.

Our disgust for murdering civilians, it would seem, only applies when we aren’t the perpetrator.

We like to pretend we don’t understand why we are despised. Or we come up with ludicrous explanations to delude ourselves. “They hate us for our democracy.” Or “those damned people and their angry god.”

But the real reason they hate us? Because we won’t stop invading their countries or deciding who should run them. The explosion of rage in Afghanistan had nothing to do with Islam and (I’ll agree with the editor here) had less to do with Terry Jones. Following the disclosure of the premeditated murders of Afghan civilians by Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and other U.S. soldiers, the Quran burning was just the latest affront from America – a nation that will never understand why the world doesn’t embrace us with open arms.

Finally, if Terry Jones is an irresponsible fool for his pronouncements on Islam, the editor is as well for echoing his tripe.

This was published in the Standard Times on April 7, 2011
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20110407/opinion/104070323

It’s been traveled before.

Aside from the fact that real democracies don’t persecute their minorities, Jews are reminded in many pieces of scripture to never forget when we were “strangers in a strange land” (see the book of Exodus). Maybe this is one reason why Muslim-bashing ticks me off so much. As a group, we should know what it’s like – if not us personally, then our parents.

Nowadays, though, we have discovered that, after centuries of being despised by zealots and Christian-tinged nationalists, we have suddenly been mailed gold membership cards to a newly-constituted “Judeo-Christian” country club [others need not apply]. We’ve arrived, we tell ourselves. They love us. Things have changed.

Well, I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but the folks who hated Jews last year have simply moved on to new enemies. They haven’t stopped their hating, and I don’t trust their unctuous expressions of new-found love. The religious right responsible for so much of the bigotry toward Muslims (and previously Jews and African Americans) still can’t decide whether they want to kiss us, convert us, wear tallit and sing in Hebrew, or keep blaming us for Golgotha. By the time they realize we really aren’t converting any time soon, I suspect they won’t love us quite so much. And then it will be time for us to die in their End Times scenario. All this is to say – we’re really still the enemy. But ever since the Holocaust it’s just been, well, a bit awkward to say things like that in polite company. But give it time. They haven’t really changed.

Yet Jews are not their only enemies. Blacks, gays, tree-huggers, socialists, progressives, unionists, Hispanics, immigrants, flag-burners, pacifists, anti-globalists, anti-imperialists, secularists, atheists – the list is pretty long – everyone’s a target. And it has always seemed so obvious to me that much of their hostility to Muslims is that Islam is simply their number one religious competitor.

But none of this is new.

A few years ago, while doing some genealogical research, I came across a 1909 immigration document which recorded a family member’s recent arrival in America on a ship from Antwerp. I always found it odd that the shipping company had recorded all this information (but more on this in a second):

19y; male; single; can read/write; Citizen of: Russia, Race: Hebrew; Last Residence: Russia, [town] Destination: NY, NY; Has ticket; Passage paid by brother; In possession of: $25; Has been in US before in NY; Never in prison or supported by charity; Not a polygamist or an anarchist; Place of Birth: Russia, [town]

In that year, 1909, many Jews were sympathetic to movements advocating anti-authoritarian forms of government based on justice, not nationalistic slogans. After all, nationalism had never been kind to Jews in Europe. For reasons of both fact and perception, most Jews were presumed to be anarchists in 1909.

And a cautious nation couldn’t be too careful about letting such troublemakers into a society whose ideal was British and German Protestantism. Organizations such as the Boston-based Immigration Restriction League were alarmed that so many of these new Jewish immigrants were “undesirable” that they helped legislate large fines on steamship companies which failed to screen them out (thus the detailed steamship records above). The League’s Numerical Limitation Bill was hardly subtle: restrictions were harshest on eastern and southern Europeans (Jews and Italians). The Dillingham Commission further restricted such immigration and totally eliminated Asians. The American nativists of the time believed these foreigners were inherently “lesser breeds” and incompatible with a superior Christian, European society – something echoed frequently by Tea Party types in the U.S. today and by Islamophobes like Geert Wilders. The League’s charter:

We should see to it that the breeding of the human race in this country receives the attention which it so surely deserves. We should see to it that we are protected, not merely from the burden of supporting alien dependants, delinquents, and defectives, but from what George William Curtis called “that watering of the nation’s lifeblood,” which results from their breeding after admission.

Sound familiar?

First they came for the Jews, then the Muslims. Who’s next?

loonwatch has previously reported the links between the Tea Party and the far-right English Defense League or individual loons like Rick Lazio, Rabbi Nachum Shifren, and a Brooklyn group protesting Park51. We’ve posted Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams’ “Allah is a Monkey God, Muslims are His Animals” remarks along with his amusing charges that the NAACP is a “racist” group. We’ve posted the NAACP’s resolution condemning racism within the Tea Party.

Now the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights has released a study of the Tea Party showing that nativism and bigotry is rampant within the movement. It’s not just blacks, gays, Latinos, immigrants, and Muslims.

Tea Partiers are equal opportunity haters.

The complete 94-page report, which studies six of the national Tea Party organizations and includes a forward by NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous, notes several efforts that the various Tea Party organizations have made to soften criticism for their racism. For instance, Mark Williams was eventually fired for his Islamophobic remarks, as was Tim Ravndal for his calls for violence against gays. It also cautions that not everyone within the Tea Party movement is a racist:

“It would be a mistake to claim that all Tea Partiers are nativist vigilantes or racists of one stripe or another, and this report manifestly does not make that claim. As this report highlights, however, all of the national Tea Party factions have had problems in these areas. Of the national factions, only FreedomWorks Tea Party, headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area, has made an explicit attempt to narrow the focus of the movement as a whole to fiscal issues – an effort that has largely failed, as this report documents.”

But the report takes the Tea Party to task for the nativism found within most groups, suggesting that its core issues are less economic and more xenophobic:

“The result of this study contravenes many of the Tea Parties’ self-invented myths, particularly their supposedly sole concentration on budget deficits, taxes and the power of the federal government. Instead, this report found Tea Party ranks to be permeated with concerns about race and national identity and other so-called social issues.”

“While Tea Partiers and their supporters are concerned about the current economic recession and the increase in government debt and spending it has occasioned, there is no observable statistical link between Tea Party membership and unemployment levels.”

The report warns:

“Tea Party organizations have given platforms to anti-Semites, racists, and bigots. Further, hard-core white nationalists have been attracted to these protests, looking for potential recruits and hoping to push these (white) protestors towards a more self-conscious and ideological white supremacy. One temperature gauge of these events is the fact that longtime national socialist David Duke is hoping to find money and support enough in the Tea Party ranks to launch yet another electoral campaign in the 2012 Republican primaries. […] The leading figures in one national faction, 1776 Tea Party (the faction more commonly known as TeaParty.org), were imported directly from the anti-immigrant vigilante organization, the Minuteman Project. Tea Party Nation has provided a gathering place for so-called birthers and has attracted Christian nationalists and nativists.”

The largest and fastest growing group is Tea Party Patriots. The report describes its May 2010 convention in Gatlinburg:

“Notable among the workshops were presentations by Pam Geller, an anti-Islam agitator; and a set by the Oath Keepers, a quasi-militia group that focuses on recruiting law enforcement officers and military personnel, and defending their version of the Constitution. A similar workshop with Spike Constitution Defenders, mixed a bit of Posse Comitatus-style rhetoric into their propaganda. Another workshop presenter, Samuel Duck, conducted a workshop advocating repeal of both the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendment.”

The second largest Tea Party group is ResistNet which is described as “notable” as a home to nativists and Islamophobes. It includes a number of militia members and anti-immigration activists, including Robert Dameron, founder of Citizens for the State of Washington (Yakima, WA); Wendell Neal, leader of the Tulsa Minutemen (Broken Arrow, OK); Mike Jarbeck, director of the Florida chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (Orlando, FL); David Caulkett, creator of IllegalAliens.us and Report Illegals (Pompano Beach, FL); Robin Hvidston of the Southern California Minuteman Project and Gilchrist Angels (Upland, CA); Ruthie Hendrycks, founder of Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform (Hanska, MN); Evert Evertsen, founder of Minutemen Midwest (Harvard, IL); and Rosanna Pulido, the founder of the Chicago Minutemen and a former staffer for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (Chicago, IL).

The report adds:

“Another ResistNet partner organization is TakeAmericaBack.org, a website launched in April 2009 to publish anti-immigrant propaganda. One article claimed that ‘multiculturalism’ demands that ‘Americans learn to speak Spanish so illegals can take over America with foreign cultures.’ Another article on this site concluded that ‘a Kenyan, Communist, son of a terrorist, as our wannabe president, who has not only expressed his hatred of America, but is also an avowed Muslim…’ Also included among the official partners is a trio of groups run by anti-Islam activist Pam Geller.”

“It is this untenable attempt to vilify President Obama as ‘non-American’ and ‘foreign’ that pushes a significant number of ResistNet Tea Partiers out of the ranks of a responsible opposition and into the columns of bigots and xenophobes.”

One minor quibble: it’s not just the attack on President Obama that moves these wackos into the column of bigotry and xenophobia.

Next in membership and growth is Tea Party Nation. Describing its Convention in Nashville in February 2010:

“Despite all of these pre-conference difficulties, the convention in Nashville was well attended. Sarah Palin spoke there, generating discussion about her speaking fee, rumored to be over $100,000. Underneath the hoopla attending Palin’s appearance, the convention highlighted the place of Christian conservatives, indeed Christian nationalism, inside this movement generally, and in Judson’s Tea Party Nation specifically. The convention also built bridges to nativists and so-called birthers. There was a marked shift away from a supposed focus on bailouts and budget deficits towards a culture war.”

The convention was also attended by an inexplicable (and to this Jewish writer, a disgusting) number of Jewish ultraconservatives, including Andrew Breitbart, Orly Taitz, and members of the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. It wasn’t that long ago that we were reviled by such bigots; now some of us are sleeping with these people.

At the bottom of the list and the bottom of the barrel is the 1776 Tea Party, heavily loaded with vigilante militiamen. These guys (and the membership is overwhelmingly male) practically define the word “fringe.”

“On February 27, 2009, Robertson attended a Tea Party event in Houston with a sign reading ‘Congress = Slaveowner, Taxpayer = Niggar.’ He’s also sent out racist fundraising emails depicting President Obama as a pimp. Robertson also has a history of promoting anti-Semites on his ‘Tea Party Hour’ radio program. Both incidents increased the negative publicity surrounding the 1776 Tea Party, but its notoriety did not stop two leaders of an anti-immigrant vigilante group, Minuteman Project, from stepping in to run the 1776 organization.”

The report includes a chapter, Tea Parties – Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Militia Impulse. The Tea Party is riddled with anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, militia members, and Christian Identity spokesmen. Dale Robertson, chairman of the 1776 Tea Party, supports the views of Pastor John Weaver:

“According to [Weaver’s] particular theology, Jews are considered a satanic force (or the incarnation of Satan himself), and people of color are considered less than fully human. By contrast, the white people of northern Europe are considered racial descendants of the Biblical tribes of Israel, and the United States of America is considered their ‘promised land;’ a theory descended from a theology known as British-Israelism. Although Weaver describes his particular outlook as a variant of ‘Dominionism,’ his essay, ‘The Sovereignty of God and Civil Government’ was listed in a book catalogue published by the British-Israel World Federation. As such, this would place Weaver just one step to the right of the most radical forms of Christian fundamentalism. The list of out-front anti-Semites on Tea Party platforms includes an event in July 2009. One thousand people gathered in Upper Senate Park for a rally in D.C. A full line-up of speakers included representatives from several tax reform groups, FreedomWorks, and talk show hosts. Also on the platform that day was the band Poker Face, playing music, providing technical back up, and receiving nothing but plaudits from the crowd. The band, from Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, already had a reputation for anti-Semitism. Lead singer Paul Topete was on the public record calling the Holocaust a hoax, and writing and performing for American Free Press – a periodical published by Willis Carto, the godfather of Holocaust denial in the United States. According to Topete, ‘The Rothschilds set up the Illuminati in 1776 to subvert the Christian basis of civilization.’ Because of their bigotry, the band had been kicked off venues at Rutgers University in 2006 and a Ron Paul campaign event in 2007. But they made it to the stage of the Tea Party without any questions asked.”

And there’s a lot more in the IREHR document: David Duke, European fascists, neoconservatives, and loons like Pamela Geller. But in the interests of space and time, read the frightening report yourself.

http://teapartynationalism.com/index.php

This was published in Loonwatch on December 3, 2010
http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/12/frothing-racism-in-the-tea-party-movement/

Rightwing bigots are bristling at Juan Williams’ firing from NPR for his remarks about Muslims on airplanes. Thank goodness he still has that $2 million job at Fox News, which apparently has lower standards of professional conduct or, for that matter, basic human morality.

“I think the U.S. Congress should investigate NPR and consider cutting off their money,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is also a Fox News contributor. Gingrich called William’s’ firing “an act of total censorship. […] I think the whole idea that if you honestly say how you feel about Islam — what he said was very balanced, people should read what he actually said — the idea that that’s the excuse for National Public Radio to censor Juan Williams is an outrage and every listener of NPR should be enraged that there’s this kind of bias against an American,” Gingrich said.

Ok, Newt, here’s what Williams actually said:

“But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried.”

If Gingrich can’t understand why these words applied to Muslims are so offensive, perhaps a couple of pictures of air travelers in “religious garb” who are also identifying themselves “first and foremost” as members of a particular religious group will illustrate the pernicious bias against Muslim Americans and the double-standard that NPR finally did something about.

Encouraged by a rising tide of bigotry and xenophobia, opponents of the Cordoba Center, a proposed Islamic Center that has been termed “the Ground Zero mosque” by its opponents, have charged that it tarnishes the memory of 9/11 victims or that it is funded by Islamic militants. This nonsense has been propagated by any number of right-wing politicians like Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, and by people like Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. In this morning’s paper Kevin Cardin (“Until radicalism subsides, ground zero mosque inappropriate”) has added his own shouts from a mob that would like to erase religious tolerance from this country’s laws and legacy.

But let’s immediately clear the dung from the shovel that Cardin has been swinging. The Cordoba Center is not a mosque and it is two blocks from the former site of the Twin Towers on property that was once a Burlington Coat Factory. The Cordoba Center’s plans are actually based on a model anyone who has visited New York’s 92^nd Street Y or a Jewish Community Center will be familiar with.

The project is spearheaded by Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, CEO Sharif El-Gamal, a New York real estate investor, and Faisal Rauf, a New York imam who in 2001 condemned the 9/11 attacks as “un-Islamic” and whose book “What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America” directly challenges the views of those who embrace Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilization” theory. Kevin Cardin appears to be one of these, ignoring the fact that the Cordoba Center’s founders are precisely the sort of “moderate Muslims” whose absence he laments.

Cardin finishes his rant by asking how the Saudis would feel if a U.S. president forced them to build a grand synagogue in the heart of their country – somehow seeing this as equivalent to an American religious denomination simply exercising its freedoms. Interestingly, Cardin shares a mode of thinking with Osama bin Laden, who similarly sees the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia as a clash of civilizations and an affront to Muslims everywhere.

But thankfully it is not up to Mr. Cardin to decide who has the right to religious freedom in the United States. Although some Christian fundamentalists may see it otherwise, the U.S. Constitution is crystal clear on religious freedom. The First Amendment begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Yet in each generation American religious groups have had to contend with bigotry like this. Early in our history it was Protestant discrimination against “Papists.” In the 19^th and early 20^th Century many Jews were accused of being anarchists. During the McCarthy era many were suspected of being Communists. Now we have the Muslims to pick on.

Let me make a suggestion to Mr. Cardin. Drive over to Newport, Rhode Island and visit the Touro Synagogue. Step inside and (if I recall properly) on the right near the door is a letter from George Washington to the congregation, assuring their welcome and safety in the United States. It reads in part:

“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

Sit in one of the benches there and ponder the fact that nowhere in the world are people of any religion more free to practice their religions than in our country. And if you are so inclined, say a little prayer that it remains this way forever.

This was published in the Standard Times on August 13, 2010
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/20100813/opinion/8130332

David Rosenberg’s letter (“Obama’s policies amount to tyranny,” July 8) recalls another time in our history when public discourse was in the toilet and the quality of political arguments was equally deficient. During the Depression demagogues like Huey Long, the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the Rev. Gerald Smith, Dr. Francis Townsend, and William Lemke were fond of throwing around the same kinds of accusations we see today from the tea party and its supporters.

The Rev Smith, ever the political opportunist, was associated with the Christian Nationalist Crusade, the America First Party and the Union Party.

In 1936 at the National Press Club, Smith called President Roosevelt a communist. He also accused Roosevelt of plotting Long’s death. Smith, who railed against Jews and socialists, drew up designs to build a full-size recreation of Jerusalem in the Arkansas hills and was known for other goofy notions, such as linking mental health care in Alaska to a secret government brainwashing program. An early prototype of Glen Beck, Smith was so nutty that even Strom Thurmond kept a healthy distance.

Father Coughlin, who became America’s first mass media (radio) demagogue, coined the phrase “Roosevelt or ruin” and referred to Roosevelt as the “great betrayer and liar” or as “Franklin Double-Crossing Roosevelt.”

Coughlin founded the National Union for Social Justice, the Christian Front, and was the pastor of the National Shrine of the Little Flower Church, which he ran as a multimillion dollar business until 1942 when the Vatican shut him down. Like Smith, Coughlin was a notorious anti-Semite, unlike today’s Fox pundits who have traded in 1930 slurs against “Judeo-Bolsheviks” for more up-to-date attacks on “Islamo-Fascists.”

Does any of this sound vaguely familiar?

David Rosenberg writes: “The Tea Party is a nonpartisan, grassroots movement of individuals united by the core values of our founders derived from the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights.”

If Rosenberg thinks that the tea party is nonpartisan and grass-roots, why are all its proponents associated with the Republican Party? Gallup Poll results published in April state that “Tea Party supporters are decidedly Republican and conservative in their leanings.” Republicans like Sarah Palin pose as if following the tea party, but they in fact are its featured speakers and its leaders.

More than that, they are the more extreme wing of the Republican Party. A case in point is the re-election defeat in Utah of Sen. Bob Bennett, a Republican incumbent who had worked across the aisle with Democrats. “As I look out at the political landscape now, I find plenty of slogans on the Republican side, but not very many ideas,” Bennett told The Ripon Society.

“The concern I have is that ideology and a demand for absolute party purity endangers our ability to govern once we get into office,” he added. In our own state the so-called “Massachusetts Republican Assembly,” which calls itself the “Republican wing of the Republican Party,” is affiliated with the tea party movement but is clearly identified with the Republican Party.

But let’s explore the supposed “grass-roots” nature of the tea party.

Tea Party Nation is a Republican concoction that features Sarah Palin. Tea Party Express is the creation of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, which in turn was created by Sacramento-based GOP consulting firm Russo, Marsh, and Associates. Tea Party Patriots has a 10-item “Commitment to America” that no Democrats have signed onto and was created by Republican Dick Armey.

Armey, who has been affiliated with or created many more “grass-roots” organizations than the Depression-era demagogues mentioned, founded the Institute for Policy Innovation, Contract with America, Alliance for Retirement Prosperity, AngryRenter.com and FreedomWorks — which is a major financial donor and ideological leader of the tea party. Fox News commentators like Michelle Malkin and Glen Beck serve as the tea party’s free propaganda center.

A media watchdog organization, MediaMatters, summarized: “Despite its repeated insistence that its coverage is ‘fair and balanced’ and its invitation to viewers to ‘say “no” to biased media,’ Fox News has frequently aired segments encouraging viewers to get involved with ‘tea party’ protests across the country, which the channel has described as primarily a response to President Obama’s fiscal policies. Media Matters has compiled an analysis of Fox News’ promotion of these events.”

MediaMatters then went on to list dozens of video broadcasts and Web links which go far beyond reporting into the realm of promotion and political organizing. In April the bias was so evident that Fox stopped commentator Sean Hannity from starring in a Cincinnati Tea Party rally (Los Angeles Times, April 15).

“Nonpartisan” and “grass-roots?”

Surely, Rosenberg jests.

This was published in the Standard Times on July 17, 2010
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20100717/opinion/7170337

The Tea Party loves to claim that Obama and a cabal of “socialists” are bringing us to the brink of a totalitarian state. Fox News commentator Glen Beck incongruously adds his own conspiracy theories, in which he obsessively tries to link liberal Democrats with the Third Reich. But for anyone who has actually studied history, Fox News and Glen Beck have more in common with German Fascism than the liberalism they attack on a daily basis.

The Weimar Republic began in 1919 after the collapse of the monarchy. Consisting of a coalition of the Social Democratic Party, the Catholic Center Party, and the German Democratic Party, it formed a social democratic government which attempted to provide a safety net for its citizens. That is, until it could no longer pay German war reparations. By 1923 inflation had wiped out the middle class and the Nazi Party, which had formed in 1919, was now a movement of angry, frightened people. In 1925 presidential elections brought back former monarchist and Social Democrat von Hindenburg, who presided over a few years of relative stability.

But the Great Depression of 1929 plunged Germany into massive economic crisis, and by then the Nazi Party had begun to attract serious money from German industrialists. By September 1930, the Social Democrats, who had previously controlled parliament, were down to 37% of the popular vote, and the Nazi Party’s popularity had spiked 700% to become the second most powerful party. In March 1932 the presidential election candidates were von Hindenburg, Hitler, and Thaelmann. In little over a year the Nazi Party had doubled.

Several months later, parliamentary elections led to a Nazi majority, and Leftists were purged. In February of 1933, as we now know, the Nazis torched the Reichstag and blamed it on the Left. Hitler then asked for dictatorial powers, which were granted by both remaining (liberal and conservative) parties. By May of 1933 labor unionists were among the first inmates of newly-built concentration camps. Kristallnacht, which was the beginning of the end for Jews, did not happen for another five years. It had all started with an attack on workers and social democracy.

The obvious question is: how did the Nazis gain such influence so quickly?

The Nazi Party was not established by Hitler, who was only it’s 55^th member. It had been created by hyper-nationalists who believed the Weimar Republic’s social democrats were out of touch with populist sentiments. The early Nazis opposed an “internationalism” they associated with the rise of European social democracy, the League of Nations, and a global economy. They were proponents of “Voelkisch” movements that sought to unify Germans around an idealized (and somewhat artificial) German nationalism established by von Bismarck, which had existed for only thirty years.

Hitler’s platform for the Nazi Party was described in his Twenty Five Points, which included abrogating the treaty of Versailles, imposing punitive measures for foreigners working in Germany, the right to annex territory, the expulsion of foreigners, immigration reform, nationalization of the press, shutting down foreign-language publications, discrimination against Jews, nationalization of trusts, and increasing old-age pensions. Nazism opposed international finance, admired mercantilism, and claimed to hate both capitalism and socialism. Nazis complained that Germans were under attack by Judeo-Bolshevism: Foreigners were out to take over their world, and Jews were the worst of the lot.

The Nazi Party should have, by any reasonable expectations, remained a fringe group of extremists. But Nazism gained great strength among former supporters of the conservative German Democratic Party, particularly among Protestants in Schleswig-Holstein, Pomerania and East Prussia, and particularly among older voters who wanted to return to “traditional German” values. The greatest number of its voters came from the broken middle class, although 40% came from wage laborers.

Despite Nazism’s ideological opposition to capitalism, industrialists supported its anti-union positions. The Nazi Party obtained funding from industrialists like Hugo Stinnes, Fritz Thyssen, Albert Voegler, Adolf Kirdorf, coal mining and steel magnates, a group of Nuremburg industrialists, and international cartels like I.G. Farben, AEG, and Royal Dutch Shell. 1933 records from just one bank show contributions to Hitler from Ford Motors, German General Electric, Telefunken, AEG, I.G. Farben, and the Association of Mining Interests.

Support for Nazism and its principles was not just a German phenomenon. In 1922 Henry Ford printed half a million copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and ran a series for several years in his “Dearborn Independent” titled “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.” In 1937 Thomas Watson of IBM and a delegation from the Chamber of Commerce met with Hitler. Business as usual would continue with der Fuehrer.

Besides censorship and shutting down almost 4000 newspapers by the end of the war, dominating the public discourse meant making sure propaganda was carefully controlled by official sources. The Nazi Party’s official paper, the “Voelkisher Beobachter,” was not the only outlet for Nazi propaganda. “Der Stuermer” was oriented toward the Hitlerjugend. “Das Reich” was established by Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister. “Der Angriff” was the Berlin Nazi daily. But the “Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung” was the Fox News of its day and was owned by the Stinnes family, which also directly funded Hitler. This p

aper was among the earliest outlets for Nazi views.

Some of the Nazi party’s tactics will be familiar to today’s Democratic congressmen. The Nazi Party’s “Sturmabteilung” (disruption section) was originally intended for breaking up meetings of its political opponents. Later, this group, which consisted of various militia members, became known as “brownshirts” or “storm troopers” and was used for physical attacks upon its opponents.

So when Fox News propagandist Glen Beck fires up Middle America and the Tea Party with disinformation, I think of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and the Sturmabteilung. When I see legislation like Arizona’s SB1070, I think of the Twenty Five Points.

When I see Muslims vilified on a daily basis, I think of Jews in post-Weimar Germany. When I see Americans slamming the UN and multilateralism while promoting militarism, I think of 1920 German views on the League of Nations and its abrogation of the treaty of Versailles. When I hear about Americans who are tired of “foreigners” building mosques or speaking Spanish in “their” country, I think of the German “Voelkish” movement. When I hear about “Islamofascism” I recall the Nazi phrase “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

And when I think of the old, white, Protestant, frightened, misinformed, angry Tea Party activists longing for a return to traditional American values, I think of the Germans who all too willingly let Hitler destroy their nation.

Charles Osborne’s recent letter (“Bigots in Arizona? Not so fast”) conveniently re-frames a civil liberties debate over a new law in Arizona as an unreasonable attack on sensible, tolerant Arizonans. While the law may be a desperate measure by some residents that state, the peanut gallery is indeed filled with angry white bigots.

There’s no question that there’s an immigration problem in Arizona. But there’s also no question that Americans love their low-wage fish processing workers, their lawn cutters, their farm workers, their meat and poultry workers, janitors, cleaning ladies, and nannies. There never seems to be much interest in cracking down on the demand which fuels the supply of illegal labor – the employers – or in fashioning sensible guest worker programs with citizenship options. And after all, if after five years of making the American Dream a little cleaner, a little more nutritious, a little prettier for American citizens, why shouldn’t those who have contributed to it be able to dream it for themselves?

But the new Arizona law is being questioned – not to ignore that border state’s problems – but because it is simply a bad law which will legitimize racial profiling.

Mr. Osborne takes President Obama to task for pointing out that the new law will indeed lead to families being stopped while enjoying ice cream. But forget the ice cream. Any opportunity – driving with a burnt-out headlight, beating a red light, spitting on the sidewalk, having a noisy party, a nuisance pet, an unkempt yard – can and will be used as an opportunity to check any Latino’s legal status. Furthermore, the new law would make it a virtual necessity for Latino citizens to carry papers all the time to stay out of jail. And let’s give Mr. Obama credit for stating what everyone knows all too well – that “driving Black” may not be a crime but remains a fact. Now to this we can add “driving Brown.”

But Mr. Osborne’s criticisms go a little beyond defense of Arizona citizens. He recalls the glory days when Arizona was a place where citizens who immigrated (in his words) “learned the language, became familiar with our customs.” To me, it sounds like culture war is the real basis of Mr. Osborne’s support for this new Arizona law.

unpublished

I was amused by Steven Grossman’s posturing as one of the Tea Partiers. There is a natural affection between people with no ideas and those with poorly conceived ones. They tend to converge in rejecting “Liberal” values of study, reflection, and moderation, along with the recognition of the fact that we’re all stuck together in a construct known as a society. If people like Mr. Grossman had their way, we’d be worshiping at the altar of 80’s style greed like Gordon Gecko or Ayn Rand.

But, ideology aside, Mr. Grossman should be taken to task for some of his bad logic and absent fact.

According to Grossman, Liberal intellectuals have (1) not solved any problems (2) because they contemplate, (3) deliberate, (4) worship complexity – all of which leads to (5) dithering and paralysis. After reading this, I found myself wondering how someone could pack so much nonsense into a single argument.

Let’s take a few examples to see why this is all nonsense. The world economy is fairly complex. Modeling something as mundane as weather requires supercomputers and complex algorithms. Avoiding war requires finesse, deliberation, and compromise. The “dithering” that Mr. Grossman ascribes to a particular Liberal (I assume he meant Neville Chamberlain) in dealing with Hitler was certainly not common to that other Liberal, Franklin Roosevelt, who brought the U.S. into the war. And while we’re on the subject of Roosevelt, he and other Liberals solved a rather big problem called the Great Depression. And, as most people in the financial world (such as another letter in the same issue of the paper) attest, the recent financial bailout was an equally serious situation. Both the Bush and Obama administrations pursued similar solutions to the problem, using the same econometric models and the same Keynesian economic theory. The difference is that Liberals are now attempting to push through changes to protect the economy from questionable banking, insurance, and securities practices. Mr. Grossman may not like it, but that’s hardly “dithering.”

And what the heck is Grossman frothing about when he complains that Liberals are joining conservatives in turning their backs on the Enlightenment or “real” intellectualism? He seems to equate liberalism with New Age mysticism, Marxism, Beatniks and Hippies. Of course, none of these groups (some of which are defunct) ever saw eye-to-eye. But why let facts get in the way of an impassioned argument?

Mr. Grossman does have one thing in common with the Tea Partiers – despite his implied claim to speak for “true intellectuals,” he seems incapable of constructing a reasoned argument based on anything resembling fact.

This was published in the Standard Times on May 6, 2010
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20100506/opinion/5060366

In his piece on radical Islam, Wayne Atkinson argues that Muslims are about to overrun Europe, institute shariah government there, equates Islam with Nazism, calls Muslim immigration a ticking time bomb, writes that Islam contains an “evil element,” and rues the absence of moderate Muslims.

Where to start with all this nonsense?

Writing in this month’s issue of Foreign Policy magazine (“The Islamists are NOT coming“), Charles Kurzman and Ulal Naqvi at the University of North Carolina demonstrate that, with very few exceptions, Muslims seem to prefer democracy over shariah. And when Islamic parties do throw their hats in the political ring, they find themselves liberalized by the electoral process. Gee, it turns out that Muslims are just like us in this regard.

While Atkinson wails about Muslims overrunning Europe, perhaps he forgets that it was the French who colonized North Africa and the British who carved up the Ottoman Empire and invited former subjects to join their Commonwealth. Or that the Germans during the Wirtschaftwunder of the 60’s and 70’s imported huge numbers of Turks to sweep their streets and take out their garbage. Now, like every generation of immigrants, many have become doctors, lawyers, teachers, and members of Parliament. This is in a country where the ruling political party is the CHRISTIAN Democratic Union. Or in England where the official religion is Anglican Christianity. The irony of worrying about religion overrunning Western nations seems wasted on Mr. Atkinson.

Shariah courts in Western countries exist – but they have no legal status. It may surprise some that similar Jewish courts (battei din, “houses of judgment”) have existed for decades if not centuries in the West. And anyone who has watched Judge Judy or Judge Brown on television has seen that many times cases are settled out of mainstream courts when both parties agree. Poor Mr. Atkinson is afraid of … binding arbitration.

And what of the “mysterious failure of moderate Muslims” to speak out against extremism? When one has wax in his ears, he cannot hear. Countless organizations, from CAIR to the ADC, individual congregations, imams, interfaith groups, and individuals have spoken out constantly.

Mr. Atkinson seems to be pushing Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory, ignoring the fact that Muslims have as strong an attachment to democracy and kindness as anyone else. This “clash” is a view that Christian and Jewish fundamentalists love. It’s also pretty self-serving.

Yes, religion is constantly hijacked by extremists. Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and Christian extremism all exist. What does its existence say about the faith traditions they hijack? Nothing. Religions are all dialects which express similar human feelings and beliefs. But Mr. Atkinson sees one “true religion” at war with “evil” ones.

Rather than demonizing a religion and falling on simple-minded formulations such as “they hate us for our way of life” it would be more productive to study the politics of terrorist organizations. We might find out, for example, that terrorists tap into widespread resentment of Western nations which prop up kings, dictators, and generalissimos while historically undermining democracies. And uncritical Western support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine does not help either. Take away the itch, and the scratching will go away.

Want to end terrorism? Start looking at the political and historical realities instead of falling back upon ignorant theories regarding other’s religions.

This was published in the Standard Times on February 8, 2010
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20100208/opinion/2080323

Last night I attended what was supposed to be a constituent meeting with Barney Frank at the Dartmouth Council on Aging. Instead, it was like stepping into a Harry Potter novel where the forces of darkness shrieked accusations that national health care would murder grandma, flashed pictures of the President photoshopped to look like Hitler, and proved only that they had no respect for, or intention of conducting, a civil dialog. It further amazed me that the local Republican Party, which orchestrated much of the circus on display last night, was scarcely distinguishable from the Larouchists, Birthers, conspiracy theorists, and the un-medicated in attendance. For all their noise, the Republicans are a party in trouble.

But the fact still remains: Americans actually want national health care and, despite some Blue Dog back-stepping on the public option, Americans like that idea as well.

According to a June survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 53% of Americans strongly support a public option in health care, and another 30% moderately support the idea. And why not? Besides education, many voters feel that their tax money should actually do something for them personally, rather than evaporate in military expenditures and corporate bailouts.

Despite all the fear-mongering, the United States is the only Western nation to have no comprehensive and universal national health care. All of Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Israel – virtually every modern industrial nation we compete with – provides this option for its citizens. The sky has not fallen in any these countries, and many of them are actually doing better than we are economically.

The proposed health plan simply ensures that everyone in the U.S. is covered. Yes, there is never a major change that does not have unintended consequences, and adding primary care for 50 million more Americans will undoubtedly expose weaknesses in our health care infrastructure, require additional physicians and health care workers, necessitate building more walk-in clinics, foster innovations in delivery of services, and stimulate the development of more sophisticated systems for storing medical records. The self-employed could actually develop businesses secure in the knowledge they had a safety net. With a system in place, over time and with more confidence, the burden of health care could shift off employers to the public sphere, making U.S. corporations more competitive with foreign companies who do not have this burden.

I’m afraid that Fox News and CNN got their amusing sound bytes from the mobocracy last night, but a rational consideration of the benefits – and risks – of expanding coverage for all Americans will have to occur off-camera.